In March 2020, the film’s auteur, Anar Azimov, found himself trapped in a foreign city under COVID-19 lockdown, and his film project was cancelled due to the quarantine. Using his smartphone, he decided to make a docufiction about his situation. The documentary videos the film consists of are spontaneous. They mostly depict things rather than people, which stresses the quarantine realities, with social life almost non-existent. The voice-over narration is mostly documentary as well. The narrator-protagonist is fictional, but his circumstances are mostly the same as the auteur’s, and his voice belongs to the auteur himself.

“MacGuffin” is a famous cinema term invented by Alfred Hitchcock to define something non-existent in the story for the characters to search for to lure the audience’s attention. The protagonist himself recognizes he’s searching for his wife in a city she’s far away from. Yet, the true MacGuffin is the very protagonist. He’s searching for himself, for his creative and romantic identity – and eventually finds he no more exists.