Konchalovsky said he was “watching the people and their life” in the village and wrote the script when editing the film.

The director’s new work, a mixture of a documentary and a feature, was shown on the festival’s last day and easily outdid its other 20 competitors. Its main character is postman Alexei from a village near the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk.

“This is just an attempt to make a film using other methods, inexpensively and independently from the market as much as possible so as not to be accountable to anyone for what you are doing,” the director said.

“This emancipates you from within and you start experimenting, which is vital in art,” he told ITAR-TASS.

Konchalovsky said he did not remember why he had chosen a rural postman as the main character for his film. “We decided to make a film about a person who has a profession which allows him to communicate with lots of people around him. Once I decided that, I started thinking about a doctor or maybe some other trade, but then settled on the postman,” he said.

It took about a year and 50 candidates to find the right one, he said.