Heavy sand (television series)

Prologue. In 2008, a woman named Olga Lvovna, a well-known Swiss doctor, was traveling from Basel to Moscow. She was asked permission to make a film about her family, and she goes to a film studio with a story about the difficult fate of her family.

The main action. 1909 year. The famous Basel doctor Leon Ivanovsky and his son Yakov come to the town of Snovsk from Switzerland . Leon wants to show his son the city where he was born and spent his childhood. In Snovsk, Jacob meets Rachel Rakhlenko, and young people fall in love. Jacob’s father does not support his son’s decision to marry Rachel, since marrying a girl from a poor family in a small town can interfere with his father’s desire to make a famous doctor out of his son. Here, in Snovsk, Jacob falls in love with the daughter of the local dressmaker Zina Gorobets, but her love will never be so mutual. The local bookstore - Pole Adam Golubinsky, in turn, is unrequitedly in love with Zina. His hatred of Yakov Ivanovsky will still play his sinister role in the fate of the family.

Jacob leaves home back to Basel , but promises to correspond almost every day, and a year later, returning to Snovsk, makes Rachel an offer. After the wedding, the newlyweds leave for Switzerland, where Rachel gives birth to a son, whom they call Leo. However, Rachel experiences nostalgia while living in Basel, plus the sidelong glances of relatives and high-society friends of the Basel family of Ivanovsky, and after a short time returns with her son to Snovsk.

Yakov misses his wife very much and, justifying his father’s fears, sacrifices his career and goes to his wife in Ukraine . Here the young family is going through difficult times, but, despite all the difficulties, it retains its love. First, Jacob will have to endure the Rachel family's contempt for himself - accustomed to luxury, he hardly adapts to life in the Ukrainian village and is constantly subjected to ridicule by Rachel's older brother, Joseph. He cannot work as a shoemaker, and father Rakhil Avraam Matveyevich Rakhlenko, through the wife of his friend Kusiel Plotkin, the flirty Riva, puts him in a butcher's shop. When the First World War begins, Jacob is not called up to the front, although he is ready to go fight for Russia - but he is ordered to the front as a potential German. He is keenly experiencing this, but Rachel’s love smooths out his experiences. During this time, he has another baby, Luba, and in the 1920s the Ivanovskiy-Rakhlenko family got two more children: son Henry and daughter Dina.

The 1930s are coming, the NEP is over, and Jacob is now working at the furniture factory as chief accountant. Ivanovo - a respected family in the city. Once an unbelievable event bursts into a leisurely way of life - a concert by the great violinist Grinberg. A native of these places, after years he decides to visit his hometown. His wife, Italian opera star Isabelle Bendetti, and his friend, a Georgian artist, come with the musician. Something magical and inexplicable erupts between Kote and Rachel. Meanwhile, the eldest Ivanovskiy’s son, Lev, who has grown up, is leaving for Chernigov in the hope of making a great party career. Meanwhile, Lyova falls in love with Elena and becomes a father to Elena Moiseevna Olechka’s daughter, but their happiness is short-lived in the yard in 1937, and the threat of arrest looms over Elena Moiseevna and Leva. To avoid shame and public trial, Elena persuades Leo to commit suicide. Little Olechka and her nanny Anna Egorovna have no choice but to go to Snovsk and ask for a shelter from the Ivanovsky family. At first, Rachel was stressedly cold to the adoptive granddaughter - it was because of her that her eldest son was killed, in addition, even earlier, Elena Moiseevna emphasized her refusal to help in the case of Yakov Ivanovsky, but eventually her heart thaws. Anna Egorovna gets a teacher at a local school.

Yakov Ivanovsky was arrested - the repressions of 1937 reached Snovsk. The lawyer Velembitskaya determined by Jacob’s state is actually inactive. Selling the last things from home, Rachel decides to hire a well-known lawyer from Chernigov - Sergei Tereshchenko, who in his youth was hopelessly in love with Rachel. Turning the line of defense, Sergei is suing the court as a business case, proving that those who wrote the denunciation to Jacob themselves are thieves and robbers. Jacob is acquitted - Rachel thanks Sergey. Hero of the Soviet Union, pilot Sokolov, and young Dina Ivanovskaya come to Snovsk together with Henry Ivanovsky to find out what love is at first sight.

1941 year. Rachel and Jacob celebrate the 30th anniversary of their wedding. Arriving from Leningrad in her hometown, the eldest daughter of Ivanovskikh Luba introduces the family to her husband, the architect Vladimir Tolmachev and their son Igor, who was left to stay in Snovsk for the summer. They are happy surrounded by children and grandchildren. Pilot Sokolov caring for Dina. They say goodbye at dawn on June 22, 1941, Vadim promises to return for her in a year. The Germans enter Snovsk. The entire Jewish population of the city is resettled in the ghetto. Trying to save his life, Adam Golubinsky goes to serve the Germans. Everyone is forced to make their choice. Families and fates are crumbling. Cowardice coexists with courage. Betrayal with courage. The fate of little Olechka again hangs in the balance. Anna Yegorovna, the Russian nanny, who saved her at the cost of her own life, was executed before her eyes. Ivan Karlovich, a long-time friend and neighbor of Ivanovskys, vouches for the Germans before the Germans, and he is hired as a storekeeper in a depot. There is a ghostly hope for the salvation of the whole family. The actions of the German army are entering a decisive phase. The daughter-in-law of Frida, Rachel’s friend, is preparing to give birth to a child, but according to the laws of the Reich, such is punishable by death. A child with his mother dies from an automatic burst, barely born. In addition, partisans are witnessing mass shootings in a neighboring village. Obviously, the next victims will be residents of Snovsk. Joseph Rakhlenko threatens his niece Dina with a revelation and she desperately kills him, after which she herself dies from a bullet policeman. Partisans steal weapons from a German warehouse. Trying to avoid the mass shooting of people, Yakov Ivanovsky confesses to Le Curt that he launched the partisans into the depot. The commandant of Snovsk, Obersturmbanführer SS Stalbe, tears and mosques - he orders the execution of everyone involved in the sabotage. In the central square of Snovsk, in front of Rachel, her husband Yakov, Ivan Karlovich, Ivanov’s neighbors and friends, the family of Belarusians Stashenkov, were executed. Rachel, who has lost her daughter and husband, raises the ghetto uprising, in the midst of which she orders her grandchildren Olechka and Igorka to run along the village road to the neighboring village. The children manage to escape, the uprising is brutally crushed - Rachel and her elderly father Abraham perish.

Epilogue. Olga Lvovna tells the viewer how their family’s story ended - only she and her cousin Igor managed to survive. Igor’s mother, Lyuba Ivanovskaya, died of starvation during the Leningrad blockade, and Vladimir Tolmachev took up raising children - a few years after the war he was looking for children throughout the USSR. Henry Ivanovsky died in the sky over his native city, Vadim Sokolov survived, received the second Star of the Hero, but never married, remaining faithful to Dina. Having lived until the beginning of the 1990s and working as a doctor in a Leningrad hospital, Olya learned that Elfrida (her great-grandmother) bequeathed to her descendants half of the state of the Ivanovsky family on one condition - they must answer the question of how they called little Leva in the family (Olya's adoptive father). Only Olya, of all the survivors at that time, knew the correct answer - Apricot. She left for Switzerland and inherited the clinic of her great-grandfather Leon Ivanovsky. It so happened that she was the only one in the Ivanovskikh-Rakhlenko family who continued the medical dynasty - the youngest son of Ivanovskiy Mark became a race car driver. The final also says that the place of Rachel’s burial was never found, and that in the local dream forests, her face appears in extreme heat as a sign of blessing to lovers.

• Irina Lachina - Rachel Rakhlenko
• Alexander Arsentyev - Yakov Ivanovsky
• Yuri Tsurilo - Abraham Rakhlenko, father of Rachel
• Emanuel Vitorgan - Leon Ivanovsky, father of Jacob
• Irina Brazgovka - Elfrida Ivanovskaya, German, mother of Jacob
• Nelly Uvarova - Dina, daughter of Rachel
• Dmitry Kharatyan - Vadim, pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union
• Nadezhda Bakhtina - Frida, Rachel's friend
• Yuri Solomin - Andrei Mikhailovich Dolsky, attorney
• Mikhail Efremov - Sergey Tereshchenko, lawyer
• Oleg Maslennikov-Voitov - Lev Ivanovsky, the eldest son of Rachel and Jacob
• Olga Budina - Elena Moiseevna, wife of Leo
• Vladimir Vdovichenkov - Volodya, husband of Lyuba
• Svetlana Nemirovskaya - Sara
• Elena Smirnova - Madame Gorobets, dressmaker
• Marina Yakovleva - Katrusya
• Larisa Udovichenko - Mrs. Yadviga Yanzhvetskaya, hostess of the hotel
• Anna Gorshkova - Zina Gorobets, daughter of a dressmaker
• Valery Zakutsky - Adam Golubinsky
• Alexander Lazarev - Le Kurt, a German conductor who became a fascist officer
• Marina Shvydkaya - Anna Egorovna, Leo's housekeeper
• Andrey Smirnov - Ivan Karlovich Krause, German, engineer at the railway depot
• Mark Rozovsky - Orel, pharmacist
• Boris Lvovich - Kusiel Plotkin, owner of a butcher shop
• Alika Smekhova - Riva Plotkina, wife of Kusiel Plotkin
• Vadim Zhuk - Chaim Yagudin, a veteran of the Russian-Turkish war
• Alexander Rezalin - Joseph Rakhlenko, the eldest son of Abraham, brother of Rachel
• Alexander Khovansky - Mikhail Rakhlenko, the middle son of Abraham, brother of Rachel
• Valeria Arlanova - Galina Stashenok
• Julia Kadushkevich - Oksana Stashenok, daughter
• Ivan Stebunov - Henry, son of Rachel
• Tinatin Guatua - Rachel (in childhood)
• Yuri Yakovlev - Leva, son of Jacob and Rachel, in his youth
• Polina Lunegova - Lyuba, daughter of Jacob and Rachel, in childhood
• Vladimir Shiryaev
• Mikhail Kotelov - Romanyuk
• Dmitry Sitkovetsky - Greenberg, violinist
• Florence Hvorostovskaya - Isabelle, singer
• Efim Alexandrov - Naum Shmulenzon, representative of the regional philharmonic society
• Ksenia Lavrova-Glinka - Lyuba Ivanovskaya, the eldest daughter of Rachel and Jacob
• Marina Shirshikova - Nina
• Alexander Lyrchikov - Nathan (1-3 series)
• Vladimir Yumatov - Stahlbe, German officer, SS Obersturmbannführer , commandant of the city of Snovsk
• Olga Yakovleva - Olga Lvovna ( dubbing - Irina Muravyova )

• General Producer: Dmitry Barshchevsky
• Stage Director: Anton Barshchevsky
• Scenario: Natalia Violina, Leonid Zorin
• Creative Producer: Daria Violina
• Operator: Krasimir Kostov
• Composer: Alexander Zhurbin
• The film used music tracks from the musical cultural project of Yefim Alexandrov "Songs of a Jewish town"
• Chief production designer: Evgeny Pitenin, Sergey Brzhestovsky
• Installation: Sergey Pavlovsky

• October 4, 2009 - GRAND PRIX of the International Film Festival in Marbella .
• 2009 - Golden Eagle film award in the nomination "Best TV series (more than 10 episodes)."

• In September 2009, the film movie Heavy Sand was awarded the TEFI Prize in the nomination "Best Director of a Feature Film / TV Series"
• You're in a cloud of fog - I'm in a cloud of dust, honey. Life and death in the series "Heavy Sand".
• Screen adaptation of the novel