Act II: The Gilded Cage Desperate for connection, Marina begins kidnapping local stray chickens and treating them like her children. The film takes a dark turn when she decides that if she cannot have human children, she will build a "mechanical son" out of straw, twigs, and eggshells. The film’s most famous (and disturbing) sequence involves a 15-minute single take of Marina "hatching" a human-sized egg in a massive clay oven.
The plot, pieced together from festival archives, is as follows: kokoshka+filma
Volkov used a bleaching technique on the film stock that washed out all colors except yellow and brown. The screen looks like an old photograph soaked in egg yolk. It is visually stunning but physically uncomfortable to watch for 94 minutes. Act II: The Gilded Cage Desperate for connection,
The film is an allegory for the "Empty Nest Syndrome" that plagued post-Soviet households after the collapse of the USSR. As children left for capitalist opportunities in the West, mothers were left as "Kokoshkas"—sitting on empty nests. The plot, pieced together from festival archives, is