On May 1, the kind family fantasy 'Legends of Our Ancestors' hits the big screens. We watched the film at the 47th Moscow International Film Festival and share our impressions of the new work by perhaps the most sensitive director of modern Russian c...

Ivan Sosnin has long established himself as an author who makes films about people and for people, and he does so with great love for stories and their characters. Where does he get such touching plots?

Provincial journalist Anton (Alexander Yatsenko) goes on a routine assignment – to write an article about a new residential complex to be built in the remote taiga. There, by chance or not, he meets a half-crazed old woman who tells him the legend of the forest lord Nyulesmurt (Anton Kuznetsov). It turns out that the old woman is the keeper of the ancient tale, and as long as she lives and remembers it, Nyulesmurt lives.

Returning to the city, Anton begins to see a fairy-tale creature resembling either Chewbacca or a Yeti with a staff. It explains to the hero that he is now the new keeper of the legend. And Nyul, as Anton affectionately calls him, has a brother and a sister, and the whole family needs to be saved because their keepers are also old people who are about to die, meaning the fantastic creatures – the mermaid Shishiga (Natalya Pavlenkova) and the mountain lord Ner-Oyka (Yuri Kolokolnikov) – will disappear. Ironically, Anton's own family could also use saving: he is divorced from his wife Lisa (Maryana Spivak) and barely communicates with his daughter Mira (Alexandra Babaskina).

Mira comes to visit her father for the holidays, and they embark on a journey where they must mend their close relationship and, at the same time, save the mythical creatures. Mira constantly draws everything that happens along the way in her notebook and sincerely takes an interest in everyone they meet.

The heroes meet a mysterious old hermit who does not speak Russian, and then an old sick woman with dementia. Both characters are incredibly touching in their simplicity and openness. Zoya Bagynanova is not playing a heroine with a terrible disease for the first time. In Dmitry Davydov's film 'There Is No God But Me', she played a mother suffering from dementia. It is worth recalling that Alexandra Babaskina also starred in a very important film about dementia, Svetlana Ustinova's 'Season of Winter'.

By saving the fairy-tale family, Anton in a sense saves himself and his good relationship with his own family. And the outcome of this whole story is every writer's or creator's dream: a 'Red Book of Mythical Creatures' with Mira's cute drawings comes into being.

Ivan Sosnin has once again created a very kind family story, full of conversations about important things, much vulnerability, much light, and no less ironic moments. All together turns into a fairy-tale road movie that will leave literally no one indifferent. So you will have to leave the cinema with teary eyes and a huge desire to call your loved ones and share a good film.