They're a brother and a sister. They're called Andreï and Nina and they meet again at their mother's funeral after a ten-year separation. They don't know what to say to each other and can't even bring themselves to look each other in the eye. There's more warmth and sympathy between strangers than between this brother and sister. Nina asks her brother to never set foot in the family home again. Andreï promises he'll abide by her wishes. Hence this reunion seems more like a definitive break up. But Andreï returns and everything that they've lived together in the past, their love, fear, suffering, returns with renewed force. Everything that they've tried to erase definitively from their lives - the memories, anxieties, the secret - is there once again. Socially uncomfortable, solitary, aware of the impossibility of their love, they dare not touch each other, draw near each other, because they know that a single gesture could lead them to a fatal passion. This story takes place in Saint Petersburg, a crystalline city, the city of white nights, where the pallid sun, which can't manage to break loose from the horizon, resembles the moon, where elongated shadows draw patterns on building walls, while the still, green water slumbers in the canals.

Igor Minaiev