Astounding stories by women born in the USSR, pioneers and survivors, that reveal their heroic experiences from the time of the Revolution in 1917 to the present day through personal testimonies and intimate conversations with remarkable women and unseen archive footage. It opens a door to their inner thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes. Their experience foreshadowed that of women of today and yet their fate is also the story of their century.
In fictional sequences inserted into this documentary about economic, social and political perspectives on possible upcoming developments, the filmmakers portray a utopian future as a foreign territory. Six public figures from various cultural and social circles reflect on the future as a matter of time, people and the world.
It’s the last dictatorship of Europe, caught in a Soviet time-warp, where the secret police is still called the KGB and the president rules by fear. Disappearances, political assassinations, waves of repression and mass arrests are all regular occurances. But while half of Belarus moves closer to Russia, the other half is trying to resist…
Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer who writes in Russian. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army, the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl. She went on to a career in journalism, and has written short stories and reportage, in which she’s covered the Chernobyl catastrophe, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and many other events – all based on thousands of interviews with witnesses. Svetlana received the Nobel prize in literature 2015.