With his mother dead and his father in prison, 13-year-old Sasha Grigoriev finds himself a charge of the State, the unwilling resident of a grim reform school. A persona distilled in the ironic juxtaposition of horn rims and a black leather jacket, Sasha possesses a native intelligence compelled to fluency in the language of the street. The offspring of institutions, he covets freedom and constantly schemes to escape. Sometimes he succeeds, only to be caught. When, quite by accident, he learns of his father's whereabouts, the boy sets off on a 1000-mile odyssey across the Soviet Union. On foot, train and boat, through cities and villages, he encounters a cross-section of strangers: the kid he cons, a kindly deaf-mute horse trainer, the officer who gives him black-market dollars. Finally he reaches his destination, a remotely situated high-security prison. Breaking protocol, the warden permits Sasha to spend some time with the father he's never met, but the law is the law and, ultimately, the comfort of freedom eludes both father and son. Alternating a gritty documentary style with poetic lyricism, Sergei Bodrov evocatively captures a boy's fierce capacity to dream amidst the bald-faced cruelty of circumstance. As Sasha, Volodya Kozyrev (himself a former reform-school inmate) conveys the complexity of childhood in a way too rarely seen. At a time when grand themes and great events dominate Soviet cinema, this Grand Prize winner at Montreal addresses with a quiet eloquence the sad irony of children dwelling on the margin. --Laura Thielen