Editor
At the center of the story is an amateur female choir of the city of Tikhvin. Each of her participants is an ordinary woman who in everyday life is completely unrelated to the scene. One of them is a seller in a store, someone is engaged in garbage collection, and someone does work as a loader to provide shelter and food. But all of them are united by a love of music and a hope for a brighter future. The arrival of the Italian delegation in the city becomes a real glimpse among the gray everyday life of our heroines, and their dreams at that moment seem even more illusory.
Editor
A brilliant observational documentary filmed at the Civil Registry office in St. Petersburg, where people come to have births, marriages, divorces and deaths registered. 'It’s like a theatre here', one says in the beginning of the film, and it indeed is, the Theater of Life. The young women working in the office have a job that shifts from being verbally attacked and called idiots, to situations where they are subject to flirt, or where they master the happy ceremony of marriage. Faces, joy, sorrow, fun, despair... It’s all very well composed, rhythmical, with atmosphere conveyed, and lives up to what a documentary should be: multilayered and universal. And about Life.
