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ABODE OF DAWN

By Kristina SHTUBERT

Documentary - Completed 2024

In a world that feels increasingly overwhelming, threatening, and inhumane, the residents of the Abode of Dawn search for faith, hope, and salvation in a remote area of Siberia. But the outside world begins to intrude and threatens to destroy their utopia.

Festivals
& Awards

Berlin European Film Market (EFM) 2025

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- GERMANY
- Duration
- 105 mn
- Director(s)
- Kristina SHTUBERT
- Synopsis
- Where do you go when the world feels overwhelming and just plain wrong? Can you escape and start anew?
  This documentary follows its protagonists for nearly a decade, as they try to build a utopian society in the Siberian Taiga. Some of them are followers of a religious community whose leader sees himself as the Son of God. He calls himself Vissarion. Since the 1990s, his followers have been building a settlement, high up on a remote mountain, for the society of the future: The Abode of Dawn.
  Vissarion himself stays at the edge of the narrative. Like planets around the sun, the lives of these people rotate around Vissarion, though they rarely ever meet him. The film focuses on the villages surrounding the Abode of Dawn, where most of his followers live. Fragments and scenes from the lives of the residents shape themselves into a mosaic. Take a step back and you recognise the iridescent image of this place in all its complexity. The film does not ask: Is Vissarion truly the Son of God? Instead, it poses the question: Are the people here happier than they were where they came from?

ABODE OF DAWN

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards