A fashionable Moscow photographer receives a commission that is unprecedented in both mystery and price. He is asked to shoot five Asian models in stylized outfits against the background of ruins in St. Petersburg, the most Western of Russian cities. And the sequence of locations is strictly defined. 
As he fulfills this exotic commission, the photographer begins to realize that the client isn’t interested in the photographs. He wants one photographic relic from the beginning of the 20th century that the photographer has in his possession. The photographer also begins to suspect that he may face mortal danger on his last shoot. 
Genetic memory and its manifestations; history that should have ended in the last century but appears in the present; trick shots of ancient and new images; images of doubles and double expositions; the light and gloom of consciousness – all this jumbles in the photographer’s mind. A carefree playboy with the initials A.D. -- that belong to someone else in another time and destiny  -- in the most stressful moment, he must solve one puzzle: Why do I stay here? 
Why is he here, in St. Petersburg, the European capital of Russia, a city that has united East and West, the imperial past and undefined present? Why is he in this most concrete and most mysterious city – a symbol of culture, an urban text that can’t be destroyed and can’t be retouched, except by capturing its demise time and time again…