Steppe

A decade after her father abandoned the family, a queer literature student joins him on the road across Russia, riding in his freight truck as he makes deliveries across the vast, desolate steppe.

She wants to understand the man who left her, to find some explanation for the distance between them, and perhaps some way to close it. But the father waiting for her at the train station is not the man she imagined. Prematurely aged, embittered, and secretly dying of AIDS, he offers little comfort or revelation as they travel through the austere landscapes of post-Soviet Russia.

Instead, their journey forces her to confront the complicated ties that still bind them. She traces the fragments of a relationship shaped by abandonment, shame, longing, and love, while reckoning with her father's place within the violence and rigid masculinity of the world that formed him.

As the endless steppe passes beyond the windshield—beautiful, harsh, and constantly changing, the landscape begins to mirror the contradictions of their relationship: intimate yet alien, natural yet imposed, impossible to escape and impossible to fully understand.

With spare, precise prose, Steppe is a haunting portrait of estrangement and grief, and of one daughter's attempt to understand the father she lost while confronting the history, violence, and silence that shaped them both.