As a remote Russian village faces submersion for a new dam project, its elderly residents grapple with leaving their ancestral home, symbolizing resilience against inevitable change.

The task of overseeing the move is given to Pavel Pinigine, a longtime resident who finds the duty painful, while his supervisor, Vorontsov, sees the project as a necessary sacrifice for the greater good: the construction of a new hydroelectric dam and the towns that will develop around it.

A team arrives on the island to dismantle the village, cutting down ancient trees, burning abandoned homes, and removing cemetery crosses to prepare the land for flooding.

As rains fall and the flooding timeline is moved up, families reluctantly burn their own homes before departing, leaving behind only a few elderly women, an old man named Bogodul, and a boy, Kolya.

While scouting locations in June 1979 for her planned adaptation of the ecological fable, original director Larisa Shepitko died in a car accident along with four members of her shooting team.

The construction of the world's largest dam in Siberia, among other environmentally destructive projects such as the Chernobyl disaster which occurred in the same year of the film's official release, were beginning to bring about ecological degradation that was "too drastic to ignore".

[3] The ancient tree that cannot be uprooted, the intertwining of Christianity and paganism, and the dense myopic fog of the film’s closing scene all represent the nostalgic mood of the late soviet era – the search for lost unity, a displaced identity, and the disorientation of a society robbed of its future.