SERGEI LOZNITSA describes his new film, based on a novel by the Belorussian writer Vassily Bykov, as an existential drama “about a man trying to make a moral choice under the immoral circumstances”. The action takes place in the German occupied Belorussia in 1942. A village railway worker is wrongly accused of being a collaborator, and two partisans arrive from the forest to get revenge. As the protagonist attempts to prove his innocence, his humanity is put to the ultimate test.