When a girl is killed by her school teacher, her father tracks him to exact revenge, but at the moment of vengeance, he is interrupted. He returns home to take a concubine to bear him a son, whose sole purpose is to complete what his father couldn’t. The son takes an oath to kill the schoolteacher.

Made on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ermek Shinarbaev’s Kazakh New Wave classic is one of the first films to center on the Korean diaspora in Central Asia. Setting destructive human desires against a ravishing landscape, this poetic revenge tale charts the forceful grip of family trauma.