Yekaterina Artemovna (Natalia Negoda), forty-five, has a hard life. She lives in a small mining town where she works as a librarian and, like her only friend and colleague, rents a little room in a project. She has difficulties making ends meet on her meagre salary, which is often paid late, and sells off some of the library's books illegally in a nearby station. One day, a man with a strong sense of civic duty, wearing a naval uniform, returns one of these books to the library, apparently without recognising it was Yekaterina who had actually sold him the book. She falls in love with this newcomer and, when he moves in with her, the monotony of her daily life seems over. In late 1990s Russia, suffering from the difficult transition from planned to market economy, each individual struggles as best he can to improve his own life. Yekaterina's father, although seriously ill, continues to work at the mine until it kills him; the police yield to corruption, and Yekaterina's lover proves to be less wholesome than he appears. Through his protagonist's fate, director Alexei Mizgirev gives a remarkable depiction of the limits of human endurance in the face of despair. The settings of BUBEN.BARABAN underscore this emotional and material distress in which the film's characters seem locked: winter is harsh, the landscape is grey, and life is, literally, bloody. BUBEN. BARABAN is a dramatic portrayal of a Russia in search of a more clement future. Locarno FF