Perhaps every person who grew up in a non-capital city in post-Soviet Eastern Europe spent a considerable part of their childhood in and around garages. Kisses, cigarettes, drugs, fights, and music gigs—garages host a plethora of human experiences that more often than not have nothing to do with vehicles.

Seven years after Im Keller (2014), where Ulrich Seidl peeks into the intimate interests and lives of Austrians in their basements, Natalia Yefimkina ventured on a deceptively similar quest of unveiling the hidden life unfolding inside garages set against the backdrop of the Siberian nowhereness. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Garage People is a portrait of a society of people that sees garages as an escape from the trenches of day-to-day struggle in an authoritarian regime. These unseemly structures have become one of the few places where freedom and individuality still persist.