Documents – whether cinematic or otherwise – which offer us access to the intimacy and interiority of tyrants are rare and valuable, since most often they are characterized by the intransigence with which they defend the myth created around them. However, not all tyrants get to have the necessary power to decide the fate of entire nations and to impose historical narratives; most of them consume their violence in their small circle, in a fight for survival which doesn’t differ much from that of each of their fellows. Such an inglorious tyrant is Ilya, the protagonist of Nikolay N. Viktorov’s debut: a young man determined to create money out of thin air in Russia’s Far North. In the erratic perorations he delivers in front of the camera he blends the nation’s glorious past under Stalin’s rule with memories from his own personal past, marked by atrocious beatings from his father; he rambles obscenities, begging for affection and validation at the same time, and writes somber and exulted poems. His petty scrap metal trafficking activities take on Sisyphean accents both for him and his partners, whom he treats with a brutality and a sadism which reveal the abyss he feels unfolding before him better than any discourse. The camera watches everything with a neutrality which is hard to bear, but undoubtedly indispensable in order to offer us the unsettling vision of this calcined psychological and social landscape. (Liri Alienor Chapelan