Dmitri Pavlov

A group of American pilots from Alaska ferry Airacobra fighter planes across the ocean on Lend-lease. The orderly course of life is disrupted when it becomes clear that the American pilots are attractive and charming young women. The feelings of the Russian young men collide into barriers of culture and language resulting in a host of awkward, funny, and sometimes tragic situations.It is the story of Russians, Americans, and natives of the Far North. It is the story of man and woman in war. Love and death are squeezed between the hills as human fates are destroyed and born.

Director Andrey Kalistratov is making a multi-part television film about the literary life of Petrograd after the Civil War, about the House of Arts, which was created by the Bolsheviks to control the creative intelligentsia. Modern Petersburg and Petrograd of 1921 are intricately intertwined in the director's mind. The cruel, bloody, but romantic world of the first years of the revolution and the artistic and everyday environment of modern cinema coexist in one space. The main characters of the film that Kalistratov is shooting - the poet and former officer Pyotr Versilov, his girlfriend Olga, the French documentary cameraman Etienne Faberge and his wife Francoise - are as real to the director as the people around him-the film's producer Semyon Mikhailovich, the film crew, actors, friends, acquaintances, relatives. Despite the demands of the producer to be "simpler" and "more economical", Kalistratov wants to make a real historical film, not a standard TV series "soap".

September of 1944, a few days before Finland went out of the Second World War. A chained to a rock Finnish sniper-kamikadze Veikko managed to set himself free. Ivan, a captain of the Soviet Army, arrested by the Front Secret Police 'Smersh', has a narrow escape. They are soldiers of the two enemy armies. A Lapp woman Anni gives a shelter to both of them at her farm. For Anni they are not enemies, but just men.

Srubov is a part of CHEKA, the secret police Lenin established after the Bolshevik Revolution. They arrest, interview for a minute, try in ten seconds, and execute intellectuals, aristocrats, Jews, clergy, and their families. In the building basement, five people at a time are shot as they stand naked facing wooden doors. No one to remember their last words; no martyrs, just anonymous bodies. Daily, the kangaroo court, the executions, the loading of bodies onto wagons. Srubov is cold, distant, sexually dysfunctional, and a deep thinker, hated by former friends and his family. As he tries to reason the nature of revolution and the purpose of CHEKA, he slowly goes mad.