The Man Who Surprised Everyone

Igor is a guardian of the Siberian forests who discovers he is terminally ill while treating wounds from an incident with poachers. Although his pregnant wife Natalia is still trying to find a cure, the matter is already settled. It is not the existential and individual dimension of dying that is of the greatest interest to the two Russian directors. Their story splits into two intertwined threads. First of all, they draw attention to the social rules of a working death, when the sick person becomes a hostage to grief that has already begun. But what if a dying man breaks these rules drastically? When Igor decides to change his identity and become a woman, he encounters radical rejection. The story transforms into a form of reflection on the extent to which the conservative community in the deep Russian provinces is organized by gender-assigned social roles.