Observatory (2017)

The camera glides over the blue-green mountains and suddenly picks out a silver dome on a small plateau – one of the telescopes of the Special Astrophysical Observatory, the largest and most important astronomical center in Russia. It was built half a century ago-away from the bright city lights, closer to the sky – in the mountains of the Western Caucasus in Karachay-Cherkessia. A few kilometers below is a village with panel houses, a school, a club and an administration. In a small world, lost in space and time – whether it is the Soviet seventies, or the future of the Strugatsky novels – modern artists come with their works. The film unobtrusively confronts opposites-physicists and lyricists, schoolchildren and gray-haired scientists, the dome of the telescope and the tent of the temple, artifacts and ancient mountains. But the main opposition is the small Earth and the boundless Cosmos, to which people listen with bated breath.