Also Directed by Igor Minaev
Surreal worlds, elegiac images and romantic letters form a stream of suppressed memories. A young man discovers diaries and film reels of his recently deceased mother. Ukrainian director Igor Minaev melts his rarely seen shorts from Soviet times into an emotional journey into the past.
Nina is a young woman of thirty years, who lives in St. Petersburg. She has to bury her mother in a winter day. The ceremony is an opportunity for her to meet her younger brother Andrei, who lives elsewhere.
The thirties, the heyday of Soviet film production. The story of the famed couple's glory — a filmmaker and actress, behind the external well-being of which were hidden strange contradictory relationships and a sense of fear that they carried through their whole lives. The prologue to this story is the 85th anniversary of Lidiya Polyakova, the formerly brightest star in Soviet cinema, who played the main role in all the films of her own husband, director Konstantin Dalmatov. Now in the courtyard there are other times, Dalmatov’s movies are called ideological agitation, and the director himself and his wife are hiding from the world in the country, trying not to let anyone in. Before the audience, there is a story of a dizzying triumph of this cinematic couple and its behind-the-scenes drama — a story that began in the 30s of the XX century.
Mitia (Maxim Kisilev) is the new boy in a technical school who must adjust to his environment in this childhood drama. He goes through a series of initiations before his classmates are ready to accept him. Andrei Ivanovich (Andrei Tolubeev) is the stern but kindly instructor who looks out for Mitia. Mitia loses his girlfriend when her mother comes to take her home, and Andrei leaves the institution when his wife becomes gravely ill.
Although he is only eighteen, twenty-year-old Nadia (Yevgenya Dobrovolskaya) permits Sergei (Maksim Kisilev) to move into her apartment and share her bed. However, his callowness swiftly bores her, and she is unable to hide her increasing disdain for him. Understandably, this is a matter of some distress for him. Her contempt is more difficult for him to bear than she suspects, and one day he is provoked to murder her.
A contemplative film whose idea is to explore the creation of the myth about the Donbas by using archive footage from documentary and feature films. The film's plot develops along two planes. The first is life through the eyes of Soviet propaganda and the Donbas as a showcase of ideology. The second is real life, hidden from unwelcome eyes. The film uses archive footage and recordings of interviews with former Donbas residents who witnessed Russian aggression and became its victims. Life promised to become a symphony of work, joy and welfare, but turned out to be a delusion and a manipulation. Now there are no illusions left. The symphony of the Donbas has turned into a cacophony of the Donbas.
