With the arrival of winter, the populace of the north part of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) is eager to get some extra supplies of vodka to forget about the biting cold and the lack of light. The temperatures are sinking beyond our European comprehension of cold (-35°C to -60°C), raising questions of food supplies as well. It's the ideal time for people with practical thinking to come to some extra cash.
Most of the men from the area are working as truck drivers (such who are not damaged by alcohol addiction), secretive about the nature of their goods and destinations. It's the war out there on the snowy roads to Kolyma and Magadan, with every ruble counting. Fair trade is none of it, although it is also not all smuggling and scammy business that will put the food on their tables; strong competition makes it hard for those not ready to make compromises to provide enough for . Visibly weathered, drivers' faces are parched, expressionless and almost as cold as the air outside their diner. The food in this humble, homely shack “tastes almost like home”.
All conversations in the diner are about driving routes and avoiding extra costs, which one of the drivers logically doesn't quite get: “Who would fine us in the middle of nowhere?”. When he's faced with the truth about police tracking the import-export activities in the area: “Platon: pay per ton. No tracker you get fined” – he shruggs it off addressing the poor quality of the roads and the sky-rocketing fuel prices. The least talkative of all customers admits of not having the toll tracker either, but he doesn't stay to participate in the conversation. Behind his back, the story continues this time evolving around him, his love of money and the way he makes it, including how he's regularly bribing the police officers to make it all happen.
The loner without financial problems is a grocery shop owner Gosha (Fedot Lvov), a stone-hearted man who lives up to his bad name. Showing no interest in helping anyone, and motivated by greed, he deals with fake vodka for the price of real one, a dangerous mix of suspicious origin that could potentially cause blindness or death. Worse than that, Gosha's exploiting the local population that is capable of purchasing goods only by exchanging them for raindeer meat and white fish, both of them commonplace in the area, but considered delicacies in the cities.
Stepan Burnashev paints a very sober picture of the abuse of power and heartlesness born either out of need or greed. By setting up the story in the isolated region of Yakutia where life is a survival game, the writer/ director comes very near to the nature of the most basic of all insticts under special circumstances.
When he brings back Gosha to his father's (Kirill Semyonov) house, the director draws very clear family relationship lines, introducing the sister Nyurguyaana (Ekaterina Khoyutanova) and her husband Aytal (Vladislav Portnyagin) as good-hearted but weak personalities who can't stand up for their moral beliefs. The father, on the other hand, uncompromisingly holds to his values, not even wanting to share a word with his fallen son.
The punishmen for Gosha's mischief doesn't come from the family though, not even from the people he pushed deeper down the drain. He is punished biblically, on a very extreme level.
Exactly halfway through the film, “Black Snow” stops playing as a drama of collective struggle, and becomes a one man horror show. Merciless in its depiction of a horrendous accident in the middle of nowhere, Burnashev opens a door to purgatory that would scare the hell out of any hard-line cleric. It is not clear if Gosha is still in this or in the other world, but his strong will to come out of the impossible situation offers the nail-biting 40 minutes of amazing performance.
“Black Snow” is the winner of the Main Prize in Fiction Competition of the Window to Europe Film Festival 2020.
