As Ivan the Terrible’s armies lay siege to the city of Kazan, beautiful Queen Söyembikä orders her troops to hide her immeasur – able riches at the bottom of Lake Kaban. Kirill and Gulnara are looking for the legendary treasure of Ivan Grozny… Maybe they will find it, maybe not – but they will definitely find each other.
The tagline shrugs: “Nyet vremeni obyasnyat” (There’s no time to explain). And apparently there isn’t, as a frustrated army doctor-turned-archaeologist, a nutjob who thinks he’s an alien, and a Russian navy conscript trying to find enough cash to buy out his commission, all converge on the small republic, where local colour amounts to a whole bunch of relics of Russian’s Mongol marchland – dances, cossacks, daggers, and most memorably in the gene pool, if the smouldering Elvira Ibragimova (that’s her in the shorts) is anything to go by.
