Siberian Education

Kolyma and Gagarin grow up as close friends inside a closed community of Siberian criminals settled in a remote corner of the former Soviet Union. The group lives by its own strict code of honour, shutting out the outside world, and the boys are schooled in theft, robbery and the use of weapons under the watch of the elder Kuzya. As they move into adulthood, prison and the changing world around them pull the two apart, and the code that once bound them sets them against each other.

Siberian Education is a crime drama directed by Gabriele Salvatores, who wrote the screenplay with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli. It is based on Nicolai Lilin's book about his adolescence in the Urka community, deported to the region between Moldavia and Ukraine. The film came out in 2013 and runs 110 minutes. It was produced by Marco Chimenz, Giovanni Stabilini and Riccardo Tozzi, with a cast led by John Malkovich as Grandfather Kuzya, Arnas Fedaravicius as Kolyma, Vilius Tumalavicius as Gagarin and Eleanor Tomlinson as Xenya, alongside Peter Stormare and Jonas Trukanas.

The film sits between Salvatores's Happy Family and The Invisible Boy in his filmography. On TMDB it holds a rating of 6.8 from 566 votes, indicating moderate approval from those who have seen it.