Young Alisa is fed up with her life in Moscow, and moves to St. Petersburg. Her roommates in the collective flat are two junkies, Vel and her boyfriend Valera the Dead Man. First they fight, but soon the two women form a friendship. Together they even go after the Petersburg underworld when Dead Man is abducted because he can't pay his debts.
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".
