After You’re Gone 2016

Alexey Temnikov [Sergey Bezrukov] is a legendary ballet dancer who spent his life performing in grand halls around the world. The press hailed him as the genius of dance and compared him to Mikhail Baryshnikov, a distinction that followed him from stage to stage. But in the 1990s a serious spinal injury abruptly interrupted his ascent.

Returning to his hometown, a town of about 70,000 people, he begins again by opening a dance school-studio and an apothecary shop, blending art with entrepreneurship and a touch of everyday practicality.

Two decades pass, and Alexey’s life settles into a steady rhythm: he continues to teach dance in the same modest town, shaping young performers while his own talent quietly endures. His girlfriend Marina [Karina Andolenko] is pregnant, giving him a sense of future and responsibility that contrasts with his long reluctance to settle down. He also discovers he has a 12-year-old daughter, Chiara, who longs to learn to dance and to know the man behind the legend.

Yet he remains haunted by unspoken questions. After a long day of teaching, he closes himself in his office and asks himself: what will be left of me after I’m gone? The fear of losing his ability to move resurfaces, a brutal reminder that his body may fail him again.

This fear only deepens his resolve. A seed from the past begins to sprout into action: a ballet set to Prokofiev’s music that he once imagined, but never dared to stage. Now he believes the time has come for a comeback—not just to prove something to the world, but to affirm his own life, to invite others into his art, and to leave a lasting mark before the curtain falls.

In this intimate drama, the film traces a life that treads the line between spectacle and ordinary home, ambition and vulnerability, and the stubborn hope that art can outpace illness and time. The planned ballet becomes more than a performance; it becomes a testament to resilience, memory, and the power of starting anew.