Nikolai Bem's "Kotlovan" won in the Anthropology category at the Cinemistica Festival.

The science fiction mystery focuses on the story of the massive quarry Mir located in Mirny, Yakutia, the lives of the people living on its edge, and its possible future. It's as if these people become participants in a grand experiment: isolated from the rest of the world, they create their own unique one, proving that humans can adapt to the most unimaginable living conditions possible.

— The crater reflects depth and void that is our collective crisis. The "New Babylon" is simultaneously a fragile utopia attempting to rebuild the destroyed, and a warning of that which we have already lost forever. One of the central ideas of the documentary, share the representatives of the Festival, is that maybe the only solution in this world threatened by our own actions is to revive our ability to work together as a society for our shared interests.

Architect Nikolai Lyutomski has presented a design for a domed "green" city there that promises to transform an abandoned industrial zone in Mirny into an oasis. Scientists from the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Biophysics, who have spent decades creating closed ecosystems for open space, are joining this mission, combining past achievements with innovation.

The director shared his thoughts on the film and its core ideas:

— During my time in Mirny, I caught myself thinking how similar the atmosphere around the city and  the quarry is to Andrei Platonov's book "Kotlovan", in which the author describes the process of building a common proletarian home, writes about happiness for future generations, about ideal society, and the meaning of human existence. The gigantic pit to me is a symbol, – one of contradiction, of an unsolved generational dilemma. What do we do with this pit that was left after the previous generation? What kind of legacy is this? Is this a pit for the construction of a new common home that never existed before? Or a symbol of the inevitable catastrophe on earth, which humankind is creating with its own hands?