Antonina, a smart and forceful artist (the radiant Nadezhda Gorelova), finds herself in a northern town in the taiga, home to a massive pencil-making factory, after her artist/activist husband, Sergei (Vladimir Mishukov), is imprisoned there. Resisting Sergei’s advice to go home to Saint Petersburg and forget about him, she gets a job teaching art at the local school. While making inroads with some students, she is actively opposed by 12-year-old bully Misha, the younger brother of a local gangster, and, more surprisingly, by the town residents and even her fellow teachers. As things escalate, Antonina comes to realize she is up against a society broken to the core.

Writer-director Natalya Nazarova counterpoints her biting critique of contemporary Russian society with the region’s luminous light and the faded beauty of its wooden buildings, structures that hint at better times in the past. And behind it all looms the forest and the huge factory that transforms the towering trees into the simple tool that an artist can use to express so much…