A story about the creative biography of Alexei German Sr. through the prism of his latest film - It's Hard to Be a God. Many shots from the shooting are published for the first time. Herman did not belong to any school or direction of cinema. Working on his films, he turned to the images of Brueghel and Bosch. Herman's hyperreality is saturated with details so that the viewer is cramped there. His method required such painstaking work that he made only five films in his life - and the last one did not finish. What was this method?