Director Alexei Balabanov believed that a movie shot on a film chamber is a living substance that retains energy. All because the film is needed to make gelatin from cow bones. Today, “Cinema on Cow's Corpses” shoot expensive and painstakingly. However, this type of filming is still popular-the case of learning how to shoot on a 16-mm camera will be far out during the Moscow Experimental Film Festival (Mieff) this year.

With this publication, we begin a series of essays about the Russian village, more precisely, about what remains of it. The author of Samizdat, the Moscow financier and a forest tower restorer in Astashovo travels along the depopulated Kostroma villages and studies traces of a once blooming life. Abandoned huts, overgrown yards and letters to nowhere - about the hardships of life and with prayers for help.