Alenka

In 1955, as migrants from Russia settle the Steppes of Kazakhstan, a group journeys back to the Canal from the frontier farms, sharing their settler stories. Winsome 13-year-old Alenka Muratova (Ovodova) convinces Dmitry Prokovich, the Soviet chief mechanic, to yield his truck seat to a young mother and her infant daughter. Alenka and Dmitry then ride in the open back with a jobless newly graduated dentist, hitchhiker Stefan and his dog, who longs for his upper-class wife to rejoin him in the countryside, and Vasselina Petrovolka, returning to inform her surviving twin daughter of the other's fatal riding accident by the river.