Ilana, a twenty-something tomboy, works alongside her dad in his auto repair shop. She teases David, her about-to-be married brother, and resents Dina, her domineering mother. It’s a tight-knit Jewish family that’s found a way to coexist in Nalchik, a dismal Muslim city in Russia’s Northern Caucasus region in 1998, the time of the Chechen war. When disaster strikes, Ila explodes in a drug-and-sex fueled rebellion that exposes the emotional secrets and lies that religious doctrine and family loyalties have suppressed. The 25-year-old old writer-director-editor Kantemir Balagov grew up in Nalchik, where a similar true story happened.