Tashkent, 1942. At this time, the hospitable city became a refuge for tens of thousands of people tired of hunger and cold war years. In urban stores, warehouses and markets in abundance of food and other goods. All this attracts the attention of criminals of different stripes, who in search of easy money gathered in Tashkent from all over the vast country. There are several criminal groups here. At the beginning of summer in the city there is a new gang operating with special impudence and cruelty…

The setting is Central Asia during the Russian civil war. In the post-revolutionary twenties, when the power in European Russia was (officially) "fully in the hands of the workers and peasants", but the fight against the Basmachi rebels was in full swing. When a Red Army detachment captures Sultan Mazar, the brains behind the Bazmachi contingent, a decision is made to escort urgently the prisoner to the Bukhara province. The difficult mission is entrusted to a grizzled mountain trapper and conscientious revolutionary called Mirzo. His expertise is essential to traverse the precarious paths and steep mountain ridges along the way, impossible terrain for the inexperienced. A group consisting of Mirzo, his brother Kova, the Sultan, his daughter Zaranghis and slave Saifulla set off on this journey. They are forced to fight on the mountain ridges as well as negotiate the natural dangers and harsh elements.

Timur is trying to prove to the relatives of his girlfriend and himself that he is worthy of their family. But Ulfat is married to another, after which the young go abroad. Timur graduated from the Institute and became the Director of a large car service…

Young guys from different social strata, some of whom have a criminal past, are called up to the airborne troops. Sergeant Alexey Burov (Alexey Serebryakov) was appointed commander of a platoon of recruits. It is he who instills in inexperienced "sons" the skills of hand-to-hand combat, mutual assistance and army savvy in the ongoing exercises. And now the day of baptism of fire has come. A unit of paratroopers receives an order to help border guards neutralize a large gang of drug traffickers trying to illegally cross the border...

In some kingdom was inhabited by seven Genie. Six are evil and one is good. Good Genie, despite the machinations of evil, helped the potter Nabi cheat khan to give water to irrigate the land of the poor.

Considering that Musakov’s Abdulladzhan (1991) was dedicated to Steven Spielberg, we might suggest that these four boys embody nothing more complicated than a conflict of youthful innocence with some ominous threat—the basic workings of E.T. (1982) or War of the Worlds (2005), say. That threat, however, is best understood not through vague nationalism or warmed-over socialism, but through the other reference-point of Abdulladzhan—Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1980). Musakov leaves his boys in a simplified radiance so bright and so overexposed that it no longer looks like the skies of sunny Tashkent, but a disturbing, borderless luminosity to match the flat tonal range of Stalker’s “Zone.” Our Uzbek boys are nowhere in particular; this is a broader domain than anything international.

Yakov Koreshnikov, a border guard with extensive experience, is leading an operation to detain a group of foreign agents. Back in the 20s, he participated in the liquidation of the Basmachi gang. Then he first met the traitor Abzal. During the Great Patriotic War, Koreshnikov again had to face him. The saboteurs sent to the Turkestan highway area were then destroyed, but Abzal managed to escape. And here is their last meeting...

A romance by Ali Khamraev with musical numbers interspersed

A Bolshevik army officer and Uzbek who has been nursed back to health by a young Uzbek woman to whom he is now married, gains responsibility for the local village in 1929. He is urged by comrades in Tashkent to have the local women drop their chadors and veils but he is also told that he should not force this on anyone. His wife declines to take off her veil, so a 14 year old girl steps forward to set the example, over the objections of the local Muslim clergy and most of the village men. After the girl is killed, and the commissar is shot, his wife takes him to the hills to nurse him back to health once again. She begs her husband to leave the village. Instead when he decides to return, she is pressured by her father to continue to wear the veil.