Presented in conjunction with the San Francisco Opera's current production of Dmitri Shostakovich's “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” and based on the same source, a novella by the important Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, Wajda's Siberian Lady Macbeth transposes the Macbeth theme to the Russian steppes. The story of a wealthy mill-owner's wife, whose affair with a young worker leads to a series of murders of powerful men - the husband, the boy's father, and the cousin who is heir to the mill - “is a potent example of Wajda's harsh realism, his obsession with desolate landscapes in which the smallest details achieve universal symbolism...and a significant document on the social divisions in rural Czarist Russia” (Milos Stehlik, Audio Brandon). Wajda made the film with a Yugoslavian cast during a period of self-imposed refusal to film in Poland.