A film is like a story that is forbidden to say aloud. That power is long gone, but people are silent and take the truth with them, allowing historians to write whatever they want. Anything you want power.
The film is based on the “simple” design of documentary films: interviews with the characters, their modern life, and what happens outside the window, parades and “ridiculous” celebrations. Chronicles of the terrible years almost no, the frankness of the reality of the blockade remains almost behind the scenes, but the heart shrinks no less than when watching the film by Alain René “Night and Fog” 1955.
The heroes of the film were those who “accidentally survived the blockade”, those who “failed to die for the Motherland”, as one of the heroes of the film sarcastically remarks – a former resident of besieged Leningrad. And he's entitled to that satire. They receive state medals and the same letters, remembering in detail everything that happened during the war. It's not a day, not a month, not a year. And the director asks his film: was it worth those sacrifices? People did not choose war, did not choose a slow and painful death in a besieged city.
Lenin was ten years old when the war took away her childhood. On her eleventh birthday, she ate a cat. No one would want to just eat a cat. The people were driven. Lenina survived until 2011, having received “voluntary” treatment in a psychiatric clinic from our country and the relevant certificate. She surrounded herself with cats. The grandmother of my classmate, as long as I knew her, always kept cereals, made crackers and kept them close to her. The fear of hunger is not forgotten.
The film has a lot of details, a lot of frames without words, when everything is said and the camera usually turns off, but here it does not let the characters go, it gives the opportunity to feel their huge, unspoken and impossible to survive.
I am grateful to the director for this film. For 70 years, no such view of this closed “forgotten” side of the war has appeared in our country. On one of the most popular film sites, the film has only one review, as if confirming the position of the already adult son of one of the blockaded women - "I'm not interested."
10 out of 10