Teddy (brilliantly played by Raphaël Personnaz), feels liberated in his lonely hut on the shores of frozen Lake Baikal in Russia, a five-day trek from the nearest village. The lake is the deepest in the world. There are no roads. No food or drink other than vodka and the fish he catches in the lake. One night, lost in a blizzard, Teddy is saved by Aleksei, a man on the run who has been hiding out in the surrounding Siberian forests. A bonding, a friendship of sorts, develops between the two disparate men.
Poetic and joyous, it’s an adventure story like no other, based on Sylvain Tesson’s Médicis Prize autobiography novel.