If I may put it this way, my childhood unfolded within a post-Soviet culture of collective participation in a lie. As a child, I often heard a story from my father's friends, one they returned to again and again, about a man they knew who had spent the entire war in prison while everyone believed he had been missing in action at the front. When the truth eventually came out, the man descended into alcoholism and disappeared. His body was later found on a garbage dump near the cemetery in the settlement where I grew up. Throughout our lives, in moments of uncertainty and disorientation, we are confronted with a question: What makes a man worthy of respect? In today’s turbulence, the answer offered by reality is often the nightmare of war, where the very idea of civilization slowly rusts away, no longer allowing us to inhabit, or even believe in, an alternative image of ourselves. The army, violence, killing, and chaos have become society’s response to that question. If you strip a man of the military uniform and everything connected to war, there may be almost nothing left. What interests me in this story is a persistent sense of unease – not in the literal sense, but as a condition of existence. It is the same feeling Hajar and all the other characters are forced to live with, inhabiting a semi-mystical time shaped by myths about men, just as we continue to do in the contemporary world. The Metallic Sky of Saturn" is a story grounded in social realism yet transcending the mundane through an elevation of the everyday to the realm of high, almost mythic realism. Within the framework of a modern reality steeped in archaic traditions, the film navigates a journey where the lowliest aspects of life are transformed into moments of absolute, magical realism. The film’s visual language is crafted in a 4:3 aspect ratio, an intentionally constrained frame that focuses on the characters and their emotions, amplifying their discomfort and mental imprisonment. To underscore this sense of limitation and inner turmoil, the visual style draws a stark contrast between the natural beauty of the landscape and the “rust” that stains the lives of the characters. The interplay of light and shadow is crucial here, producing a sense of suppressed beauty and tension, layering the film with a kind of "rust" that is both decay and an element of aesthetic intrigue.