Olga Mikhailova

Preserving the text of the play, the amazing dialogues, the brilliant characters, we have transposed the action into today’s Russian provinces and changed only one thing: the age of the heroes. In Anton Chekhov’s play the heroines are aged around 25; now they are 55. What does that do? The heroes’ retorts, stylistically inappropriate from today’s twenty-year-olds, are absolutely organic for the older generation, the ‘Soviet’ intelligentsia. The problems of Chekhov’s classical work concerning the search for a meaning in life, the loss of ideals, the fear before death without having achieved anything in the world, the desire to be useful to others – all these things are also a typical attribute of the Soviet intelligentsia.

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.

Marusi's father dies on the operating table, and from that moment her life has changed dramatically. In search of work, the girl meets Alexei and his cousin Kostya. Both young men are not indifferent to Marusa - now she has to make a difficult choice. She still does not know that Kostya is the very doctor who unsuccessfully operated on her father.

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.