This Soviet-made love story is set in Kirghizia, and is based on a short story by Chingiz Aitmatov, a friend of Gorbachev's whom he later appointed Ambassador to Luxemburg. This film is a creative collaboration between the very-well-known Russian filmmaker Sergei Yutkevich and the film's actual director Irina Poplavskaya. The story concerns a love affair as seen through the eyes of Seit (Nasredin Dubashev), a young artist. Seit's older sister Jamilya (Natalya Arinbasarova) is married to a soldier who is away at war. She meets, and begins to fall in love with another soldier, Daniyar (Suimenkul Chokmorov), who is recuperating from his wounds in her village. The setting, in an Asian part of the USSR, is exotic and unfamiliar, and it receives a lush photographic treatment, moving from black and white, to sepia and then to color in keeping with the progress of the young artist's pictures.