The Reluctant Contact

On a remote Arctic Island, a brutal murder triggers increasing paranoia in a Cold War Soviet mining outpost. Keeping out of KGB trouble and living on his wits, the mine’s engineer is lured into a dangerous affair with a mysterious femme fatale, plotting her risky escape to the West.

Svalbard, Arctic Circle, 1977. In Pyramiden, a Soviet mining outpost on Norwegian territory, Ukrainian mine engineer Yuri still plays by Stalin-era rules: Look after number one. Yet when a coworker is found dead, Yuri decides to investigate. Simultaneously, he begins a stormy affair with the volatile Anya who has come here to meet an unknown contact. Another new arrival is Katrin, an avid communist from West Germany. However, Timur, Pyramiden’s KGB officer is suspicious of this foreigner and blackmails Yuri into spying on her. Meanwhile, Yuri discovers that Anya intends to defect to the West. Yuri agrees to help her, while also being acutely aware that there is still a murderer in Pyramiden. When Anya’s contact finally reveals himself, Yuri is even more unsettled. The man, Grigory, Pyramiden’s senior communist party official, is Yuri's close friend. While Pyramiden is frozen in twenty-four-hour darkness, Yuri finds himself in a dangerous world of secrets and conflicting agendas.

Keywords: individual vs society, isolation