A love born in an apple orchard – that’s the meaning behind the name of the apple variety Dear Bulgaria. In 1942 a young fruit grower named Leonid arrives in Almaty and dedicates himself to this apple variety bred by his father. During the war years, intelligent visitor-refugees from the big cities of the Soviet republics settle in the phantasmagorical emergency resort town of Almaty, which subsequently becomes an epicentre of film-making. On the other side of the orchard, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is being made while the local police search for a missing writer.

This latest work by Russian filmmaker Aleksei Fedorchenko is a psychoanalytical whodunit that revolves around the roles that apple seeds, melancholy, and cinema play in people’s lives. The film, which won the Best Director prize at the Moscow Film Festival, is inspired by the autobiographical novella Before Sunrise by Mikhail Zoshchenko (who was deemed “an alien and hostile element” by the Soviets). Fedorchenko erotically and ironically weaves fruit growers, non-flammable manuscripts, kabuki, cineastes, other intellectuals and casual passers-by into a visually fascinating web of references. Fedorchenko is a familiar name to local audiences – his films Angels of Revolution (2014) and Anna’s War (2018) have won awards in previous RIGA IFF Feature Competitions.