After Trofim becomes jealous of his brother’s feelings for his wife, he decides to kill him with an axe and flee the countryside for St. Petersburg. When he arrives at the train station, Trofim encounters a french filmmaker and starts to interrupt him as he set up his camera on the platform.

Riffing on the Lumière Brothers’ train film, Trofim marks Aleksey Balabanov’s first excavation of the earliest days of cinema. A Borgesian miniature that leaps from sepia-toned melodrama to present-tense commentary on film preservation, it makes for a poignant companion piece to Of Freaks and Men.