A novice documentarian wants a place at film school and sets out to shoot a study of an interesting person. Finding no one at 11 at night, she ends up at the Smolensk Cemetery, at Aleksei Balabanov’s grave. Trying to make a film of it, she comes away with a string of botched sketches: a couple on a first date; a painter who has spent years on a portrait of Balabanov;people who turn up to drink and argue about cinema. It was dark, the camera pointed the wrong way, she had promised not to show a thing, she walked out on her subject. Everything that mattered was not caught on camera, and so it was drawn.
