Description:

A man brings about the end of the world, which his compatriots greet with joy and merriment. Based on the 1921 short story by Andrei Platonov.

Platonov had just lived through the "end of the world" (the well-known events in Russia at the time), and the story was written while his country was in the midst of a horrifying civil war, and the cities ransacked by crime. Director M. Titov, likewise, made his film while his country and its values were beginning to fall apart around him (many of the values were different from the ones in Platonov's time, but it was an analogous process all the same), and on the cusp of civil wars, a crime wave and health epidemic. He was not the only one to notice the trend - many animated film directors from across the USSR were making unsettling and apocalyptic films in the late 1980s and early 1990s that reflected the insanity and breaking apart of the national psyche that they observed (Robert Saakyants in Armenia, Igor Kovalyov and Aleksandr Fedulov in Moscow, Vladimir Petkevich and Aleksandr Petrov in Sverdlovsk, Vlad Fesenko in Uzbekistan, to name but a few). In keeping with the overall trend, this film has interesting art direction and uses surrealism and dream-logic.

The short story had never been translated either, so this is the first translation of this work in any form. There are a few things that are lost - for example, the Russian word for "world" is the same as the word for "light", so when the villagers are described as living "away from the world", it could mean "away from the light" as well.

This film is not on IMDB and has never been released to the public on DVD or anywhere official, at not since the original release. The only accessible source is a ~150mb avi video file that someone shared in 2015.