Socrates of Kamchatka blends documentary and fiction to tell a story about Anfisa, and her horse, Socrates, who was murdered in 2012 to punish Anfisa for her economic success. It is a tale about the “breaking” of horses and people by caring Communist masters.
From the documentary thread of the movie, we learn about Anfisa's life: happy Soviet childhood during 1980s; stealing meat in undergarments in the chaotic 1990s; running a very successful tourist company during Putin's nationalism of the 2000s. From the fictional thread—Socrates' voice over narration—we learn a somewhat different perspective of the human plight of the past 30 years. Humorous and sad, mixing folk lyricism and official government verbiage, opinion and fact, truth and fiction, Socrates’s narration echoes unstable Russian discourse.
