1980, USSR. Human rights activist and political prisoner Mustafa Jemilev is exiled to Siberia, where he works at the oxygen station. 3 people are headed to him across the huge country with different goals - to meet, to destroy, to protect.
1980, USSR. Crimean Tatar rights activist Mustafa Jemilev, who became known around the globe after his hunger strike for 303 days in the Soviet prison because of an unfair conviction, is exiled to the settlement Zyryanka in north-eastern Siberia, where he works at the oxygen station. His routine and primitive job of filling rusty tanks with oxygen is similar to the one of Sisyphus, who is the hero of ancient myths and existentialist prose by Albert Camus. Zyryanka is many thousands of kilometres away from another place where, back in 1944, the Soviet authorities deported the whole Mustafa's nation, Crimean Tatars. Mustafa, then just a baby, was expelled from his homeland, Crimea, without any legal ability to return home. This inextinguishable pain burns him from the inside and pushes him to resist.The prosecutor Yehor Shalandin, who knew Mustafa due to other political cases, considers Mustafa the state enemy, miraculously surviving for many years, and needed to be eliminated physically. Shalandin takes a long journey to Zyryanka as finally saw an opportunity to destroy this unbreakable Crimean Tatar activist. A Soviet reporter Anton Lunin is murdered in Zyryanka and Mustafa is the suspect because the murder happened shortly after the journalist had published an article proclaiming Mustafa an enemy of the Soviet state. Accusing a famous human rights activist of murder is absurd, but the KGB is determined to use it for the final win over Mustafa.Another person travelling to Zyryanka is a young Crimean Tatar woman Safinar. She got to know the hero of her nation through letters and was inspired by Mustafa's persistence and invincibility. Safinar leaves her favourite job, her parents and friends, and starts a long journey by trains and planes followed by the KGB. Her goal is to meet the living legend in person. Along with the food and treats from their kin, she brings Mustafa her support, care, and, most importantly, love.Who's going to win this undeclared fight? The powerful regime or the idea of inner freedom inside each of us, which makes truly free people unaffected by prison, torture, or the dark abyss of the future? Sometimes, the filling of rusty tanks is just a moment of silence before the nation saturated with oxygen bursts into flames of the fight for their rights.
