“Gorodomlya” is a fantasy drama about Human aspiration to explore the Space. The script is based on third interwoven lines: historic events reflecting the first steps in creation of a space rocket by the man, a fictitious story of a village boy, an associative and poetic line of dreams, fantasies and visions of the protagonists.

The first episodes of the film carry us away to the space: we see an enormous surface covered with round craters and slowly moving at the background of the stars. An astronomer – an alien mind of an extraterrestrial civilization – is examining a little blue planet with a telescope. We do not see the real appearance of the Astronomer, but we can read his thoughts: observing the Earth from the far Space this mind is trying to solve the same question as other film characters inhabiting the Earth, a naпve village boy and German rocket engineer creating a mechanism for exploration of the space. What is the Man? A part of the animal world of the planet or a fragment of the Universal Mind? Does the Man need to go beyond the Earth limits? The boy, the engineer and the Astronomer are thinking about the same things: their ideas, dreams, thoughts of the future, picturesque fantasies are interwoven into the film events.

The film continues on the Earth. The coast of the ocean, a sea wave is washing sand off the collapsed rock. A wave is covering a black stone, and on its surface a drawing shows through, a weak hesitating light illuminates fragments of lines, geometric figures, and the stone seems to come to life and smile to somebody…
A man in a strange garment – it might be a scuba diving suit or a modern space scaphander – is floating on the water surface. The sky is getting darker above him. Waves produce a hardly audible noise and are covering his face. It is getting dark, it s almost black. Stars are hardly visible, as if through the thickness of water. The image is changing – sometimes one thinks that he sees the far lights of a city somewhere on the Earth through the thickness of the atmosphere. A child`s quiet voice can be heard.
Boy`s voice. The light from the far stars is coming to us. So what? It is foreign. Nobody understands what it wants. Here it goes. It has reached the ear, the forehead. Passing billions of kilometers, it neither fades away, nor vanishes, nor loses its call. It speaks out, and I have to hear. But I cannot hear. Even if I can hear I can understand nothing. If I understand I will forget. It is always here. It is in my head. What for? It repeats, it buzzes all the same. If everything had been different, we would have seen the total darkness in the sky.

After this, when titles and the prologue are over, there goes a narrative based on real historic events: in late 1946 a group of German experts including scientists and rocket engineers were brought to the island of Gorodomlya in the lake of Seliger. In the atmosphere of full secrecy under supervision of the USSR Ministry of Defense, a R&D Institute -88 (so called NII-88) was engaged in development, production and testing of rockets vehicles of a new type good for transferring a capsule with cosmonauts to the space. At nights residents of the vicinities could not sleep waken up by an unknown roar and glaring flashes above the lake.

Boys are running across the field trying to keep ahead of each other. They are climbing, jumping from a stone to another stone and running up the hill. There is a sheet of water in front of them. It is evening, early summer. An enormous lake and an island on the horizon. There is a strange glow above the island. The sky is sparkling in the dusk. Three boys are standing on the hill. Above them, disturbed, crows are flying. A piece of the sky above the island and water is flooded with red and green light. A flash followed by darkness.

Evening. A village barn. A woman in a shawl is milking a cow. Suddenly, a glaring light penetrates through the barn holes. The woman`s instinct is to bow her head and then cross herself. The space outside the barn walls seems to emanate light. The glow is getting even brighter, all corners of the confined space become visible, including the texture of wood, cow`s skin, bucket metal, milk. Caught with fear, the woman holds on to the animal and presses her forehead against it. They freeze in anticipation. A web glistens where flies are struggling for life and a spider is rushing about.

The island. Men in leather jackets are standing in the middle of an accurate-looking meadow surrounded by pines and birches. An unusual glow of the sky makes the night look as a day. The meadow is a regular circle. Grass here is as if burnt by the sun. A flash. The people are looking up at the sky. Silence. Darkness. Suddenly, a narrow beam falls on the ground – someone has lit up a pocket flashlight. Here and there people light up their flashlights, light clusters are moving, coming together and parting, showing hands, gestures, anxious faces. Snatches of conversations in German and broken Russian. The people are talking about a failed test, and that the rocket has exploded again before leaving the atmospheric circles. Suddenly one of the group starts dancing. He is a stump and gloomy man, - when he is dancing he looks like a crab. Other engineers set their flashlights at him, and are looking at him, a little bit perplexed and tense at first, and then smiling.

Village people are in fear. In the morning after the explosion cows have stopped giving milk, fish in the lake have started running in circles. A village cemetery. Several cows going crazy of the rattle and unknown roar are running among graves, two cows are trying to “attack” a stone structure, a half-broken tomb trying to find shelter there. A group of village men are trying to catch the cows and bring them back to the village.
The village boy picks up stones with strange signs on them. He is watching the mysterious island and sees people carrying bread to the island. A neighbor is calling him – the Boy`s mother is going to give birth to a baby, and he has to run to the neighboring village and fetch the doctor.

On the island, a rocket engineer is doing physical exercises. He is crouching holding grips (or a weight – looking like black balls, which is an important thing), wriggles and twists himself on a rotating circle. The space gets wriggled and twisted together with him. The man sees a black hole gradually flooded by light. In the darkness a falling star dashes by – the engineer thinks of a technical idea that should solve the problem of transferring a capsule with a man to the space orbit. The engineer dives from the wooden footway into the water and is swimming under surface.

Village men decide to find out why cows and animals are suffering. They enter the lake and, their faces turning gloomy, are swimming toward the island.

Afternoon. The island. Men in leather jackets are sitting in a big wooden hut. There is a black board on the wall. One of them is explaining something to his friends with a tense expression on his face. The engineer is talking about conquest of the space by using rockets working on energy extracted from black holes. He is drawing formulas on the board. On the rights there is a globe circle. It has some incisions on it. The engineer provides the conclusive comments and suddenly says that the following time the rocket would not explode since, as soon as it gained altitude the engine would fall off on the ground. The audience are shocked, then somebody comes up to the board and completes the formula. Extremely excited, they all start speaking at the same time.

The other bank of the lake. The boy is getting in an old wooden boat and is sailing towards the island. He wants to find out what mysterious people are tossing fiery balls into the sky. He makes awkward strokes with one ore. There are stones of strange form at the bottom of the boat.

In the island the men in leather jackets are tossing each other loaves of bread. They are making jokes and laughing. Loaves are flying like missiles at the background of pines. The last in the “line” tosses loaves in the window of a wooden house.

Water penetrates into the boat. The boy is trying to get it out with a tin. A shot of the underwater world. The ocean bottom. Mysterious plants. The astronomer is setting his telescope at the far galaxies and sees the planets absorbed by black holes.

The boy is drowning. He opens his eyes. Unusual things are passing before his eyes. The subaqueous world looks more attractive that the sublunar world. Suddenly an octopus catches the boy by his hands and neck and is carrying him up. The boy is trying to struggle, but his force is fading away…

At the same time the village men reach the island and start exploring it.

There are the boy and a man in the forest beside a fire. The man deftly makes a “drier” from thick branches and hangs wet clothes above the fire. Then he gives the boy his leather jacket. The boy looks surprised when he touches the lather. They turn out to speak different languages. The boy asks his savior if he is human? The engineer bursts out laughing and gives the boy a bar of chocolate that the boy sees for the first time in his life.

The engineer is walking along the village with the boy. They are passing a field full of dandelions and the engineer explains to the boy that the Universe has the shape of a dandelion, and that soon cosmic beams will carry the human Mind beyond the limits of the terrestrial space. The new friend shows the boys how dogs are trained that are supposed to fly to the space. A dog is rotated in a centrifuge and then it is set free. The engineer beckons up a dog. They feed it on ham.

Evening. The boy stays alone. He sees a tennis court and a German girl who is training playing tennis all alone. The girl beckons him and gives him an orange. The boy does not know what this is. The girl shows how it should be eaten. In broken Russian she explains to him that today something important is expected to happen. All men have gone to the meadow protected with a fence. The girl holds his hand and leads him to the forest. Passing a barbed wire they are coming o a rocket launch site and see everything happening at the site. A launch of a small rocket. A fiery ball rushes into the darkness. A victory. A tumult of rejoicing. The head of the rocket men delivers a short speech on how dreams of populating other planets are coming true.

The group of local men are watching what is happening from the trees which they have climbed in advance.

An observatory on a hill. The astronomer is watching a vast clustering of unknown substance on the border of the solar system. Devices fail. Suspicious silence. The astronomer leaves the telescope. He is going to warn the terrestrial mind of the danger and devilry of the Space. This space knowledge will damage the human mind and make its existence senseless. The nature will put barriers on the way to this expansion. The humankind will suffer senseless sacrifices on this way. He is thinking of sacrifices that people will have on the way of exploring the Space.

Night on the island. The rocket engineers are celebrating the successfully performed test. The boy is glad too. The rocket engineer and his friends say jokingly that it is exactly this Russian boy who will become the first cosmonaut in several years. In the middle of the feast an unknown hubbub is born in the air. Dogs prepared for space flights are howling. The dogs want to run away and are gnawing at the locks of their cages. This is easily explained. The village men have under favor of the darkness got into the settlement in order to break the devices and save the dogs prepared for space tests.

The engineer is having a dream of a piloted ship flying into the space. A man in the space suit is gasping for breath and trying to get out of his shell. He tears the space suit, presses his head in his hands and is trying to crush his skull and tear his skin. The cosmonaut is suffocating, and the man`s dead body is floating in the capsule of the ship under zero gravity.

The Boy is having a dream of flying creatures. Flares of water remind of the shining stars. He sees strange human creatures with heads of robots or stone idols. He joins this squad. His head is growing and he sees his palm covering with beautiful scales, and his fingers turning into crab tentacles. Human-fish-birds are floating in the blue depth of the air, and then in the depth of water, it seems… They both are waken up by the hubbub and dog barking arising in the middle of the night.

The island. The night incident is over. Village men are arrested by the security service. All dogs are quietly sleeping in their cages. The engineer is at the plant. The workers are in high spirits. A capsule is being assembled for a flight of a dog.

The boy is back to the village. He is inspired by what he has seen and heard on the Island. Together with his friends he is making his “rocket”: they pour old powder into a capsule made from a tin, instead of cosmonauts they put fish there; but the “rocket” does not take off, and the boy has a quarrel and fight with his friends. After he is back from the island the entire village calls him a “cosmonaut”.

A lesson in a village school. The boy is taught that the man is an mammal. The man originated from the monkey, the teacher says. The boy argues with her and says that the man cannot be an animal. The boy comes home and sees his mother breasfeeding his little sister. The boy decides to give up school. He has to prove everybody that the human body is obedient to the mind only.

The boy is standing on the bank. He says to his friends that they are being deceived in school, that the man is not an animal but a part of the Cosmic Life, that the human predecessor is not a monkey nor a pig but a star, rock or stone. The friends are teasing him, somebody utters a grunt, somebody bellows. In order to prove that he is right the boy makes tests over himself. He dives into water, plunges into silt. He is trying not to breathe and live under water. The boys are
carrying him to the bank.

The island. An explosion at the plant where the capsule is being built for flight of the dog. Frightened people are jumping out of the windows and running toward the forest. One more explosion, even more powerful that the first. A small hospital in the forest. The engineer is bringing his burnt friends. All dogs intended for the tests are dead. The girl straps up men`s wounds.

A small military airfield. A helicopter is ready to take off, and a car dashes into the middle of the field. A general and two men in private clothes get out of the car and get on board of the helicopter.

The boy continues testing himself. He bends himself, puts himself in an old cart wheel and other
boys start the wheel from the hill. The wheel bumps into a stone and falls into a ditch. The boy is lying on his back, he cannot stand up since he has a spine injury. He is watching the sky and sees the helicopter.

The island. The helicopter land on the meadow. Important officials and the general in a Cossack hat. Snatches of talks… explosion… The project is over, the German engineers are offered to leave the island.

A feast in the village. Local men and women drink vodka, getting it with a cup from a bucket. They are frying fish and say that now everything is going to be as it used to. The boy is lying on his bed in his hut and hears drunken songs.

Autumn. A GAZ car is driving fast along the cross country. It pulls up in front of the house on the bank. The engineer gets out of the car and asks a hairy man, the boy`s neighbor about something. The latter points to the hut. The engineer is at the bed of the sleeping boy. The boy wakes up and recognizes him. His mother says that the boy is getting worse and worse. Indeed, the boy is only smiling with a weak smile but cannot even reach out his hand. The engineer leaves a small globe and a box with products on the table.

Nilova hermitage is on the other bank of the lake. Beside an orthodox church a woman is breastfeeding her baby. The GAZ car pulls up at the steps. Dogs are barking. The rocket engineer enters the church. In one of the aisles there is a coffin with a dead woman, in another aisle, a baptismal ceremony is taking place. Several poorly clad old women quickly cross themselves. The baby is squalling. Everybody is watching the rocket engineer. The rocket engineer approaches the baptistery. He asks the priest something in German pointing to the dome with his hand. An offscreen voice translates: can the man live there? The priest waves the rocket engineer away – come afterwards. He bathes the baby in the water and continues the ceremony. The rocket engineer sees sun glints on the water surface. He starts thinking of something. The baby is crying.

The boy is back on his feet only in winter. The lake is covered with ice…. The boy is walking with a stock, he still feels pain when walking. However, overcoming the pain, he goes to the island across the ice. He is looking for a settlement of rocket engineers. The settlement is empty. Empty houses. Empty plant. He finds a room belonging to his friend, the rocket engineer. On the floor there are sheets, fragments of formulas, drawings, a map of the starry heaven. The boy collects all this into a sack.

Several years later. Another planet. The astronomer is watching a quiet sky. Celestial bodies move along their orbits. Black “cracks” in the Sun are hardly visible. The Astronomer finds the Earth, watches the blue planet, the tumbler clicks, and the image grows larger, he sees a tiny dot of a rocket carried forward to the orbit, and the rocket vehicle burning with explosion.
The astronomer leaves his devices. We see a clean white plain surface on which a dark hand is writing strange signs… The surface of the alien planet, steel dust is lifted by the wind. We can hear heavy steps and see footprints of a triangular shape on the dusty road… The camera goes up and we can see a small dark dot at the background of the endless plateau covered with craters and channels…

The Earth. The village on the bank. Ten years later. Spring. The same hut where the boy lives with his mother and sister, but there are no signs of the past flagrant poverty: the table is covered with a cloth, and there are curtains on the windows. In the corner there is a small lens TV set. The boy – he is 20 y.o. now – has remained an invalid, he has a wooden cane beside his chair. Now he is engaged in repairing radios and other appliances of all residents of the vicinity: his soldering tool is always fuming on his table. There is money in the house – the mother putsbread, a teapot and biscuits on the table. The sister runs in the house and turns on the TV set. An excited broadcaster reports that the first cosmonaut, Yury Gagarin, has successfully landed in a pre-fixed area of the Soviet Union. A solemn music sounds, and there are news shots on the screen: Moscow residents have gathered on the Red Square, there are fireworks in the sky; everybody is joyful, crying, celebrating each other.

The boy, his mother and sister are looking at Gagarin`s photo,

In the epilogue we see three astronauts who have landed on an unknown planet. They discover that the atmosphere of the planet is almost the same as that of the Earth, so they take off their space suits and enjoy breathing the air in. Then they go to the ocean: their devices indicate that the composition and temperature of water remind of the best resorts of the Earth. The cosmonauts are bathing in the ocean and then fall asleep on the coast of the unknown ocean of the unknown planet. Gradually their bodies turn to stones. Three petrified bodies are lying on the coast of the ocean on the alien planet. They are gradually become covered with steel dust.

Boys are running across the snowy field. They are running up the hill. On the horizon there is an unusual glow. The boys are standing on the hill. In front of them there is an enormous lake and a far island. The sky above the island and water is flooded with unusual light. There comes a newsreel – the children are standing on a high rock and watching the night sky – there comes the sound of a husky voice saying that the children believe that the cosmonauts have not died and everybody who has emerged into the space is still rotating around the earth. They believe that sometime they will become cosmonauts and meet their brothers-in-mind somewhere in the open Universe. The boys are watching the sky. The stars are shining above them.