Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky is not just one of the founders of world color photography, the author of the first color postcards in the Russian Empire and the publisher of the Amateur Photographer magazine. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, he was the first to realize the exceptional mission of color photography: only photography “in natural colors” will fully preserve the appearance of what can be lost at any moment. The professor set himself the fantastic goal of traveling around and capturing the entire Russian Empire on a camera in order to leave a complete “collection of sights” to posterity. Enlisting the help of the tsar, Prokudin-Gorsky captured thousands of objects on the territory of the entire Russian Empire. The film tells about the fate and professional feat of Prokudin-Gorsky, gives a panorama of the pre-revolutionary empire and portraits of its contemporaries. In the footsteps of Prokudin-Gorsky, the film crew of Leonid Parfyonov visited 12 regions to see for themselves the changes that had taken place in the country. The film was attended by the grandchildren of Prokudin-Gorsky, who live in France, as well as experts from the US Library of Congress.