Some sporting victories are about more than just claiming a title. Some of them go down in history. The film follows the most dramatic and legendary showdown in the history of chess – the match between Anatoly Karpov, then world champion, and Viktor Korchnoi, a recent emigrant from the USSR. In this battle between two outstanding chess players, a duel of personalities under immense psychological pressure, the stakes are incomprehensibly high.

The World Champion

Masked figures with machine guns march into the secondary school in Karatas, take the pupils hostage, and execute one of them. They make no demands. Silent terror is their modus operandi. Seeing as the army will take two days to arrive due to a snowstorm, maths teacher Tazshi decides to assemble his own assault team: his ex-wife, the gym teacher, the cowardly school principal, an alcoholic night watchman, the village idiot, and an incompetent chief of police.

The Assault

Ademoka is a headstrong and gifted 15-year-old girl whose big dream is to study. Her status as Lyuli an illegal immigrant from Tajikistan is a serious obstacle to this. She is exploited by her extended family and forced to beg on the streets, she manages to free herself from the family, when they get deported she has to choose between family and education. She gets helped on the way by some oddball characters,  who come to her aid against the corrupt system and the patriarchal family.

Ademoka’s Education

The Kazakh village Karatas has long been subjugated by a criminal boss called Poshaev. He provides housing and jobs for the locals but will ruthlessly execute anyone who dares to oppose him. This is the lesson the pauper Arzu is about to learn first-hand—his wife Karina has informed the police about the crimes that are taking place there. Arzu is a cripple; now he must raise his little daughter alone. He is so helpless and grief-stricken that he doesn’t even seem to be contemplating revenge. Poshaev takes him under his wing and offers him the position of a guard at a building site. Soon Arzu has a chance to prove his loyalty, and he becomes Poshaev’s right hand. But where do Arzu’s real loyalties lie—with his boss or with the idea of justice?

Goliath

Galya, an alcoholic procuress, has lost rights to her daughter, Zoya, who is to be put in an orphanage. Galya decides to kidnap Zoya, and, with her autistic boyfriend, Stasik, heads to Kazakhstan to find Zoya's biological father.