Paris, spring 2015. Faustine travels to Syria with her little son to join ISIS; but, once in Raqqa, she soon realizes the hell she is gotten herself into. Her husband Sylvain quickly understands that the French government is powerless to help him, so he plans with some friends a high-risk extraction operation to get his family back.
When he arrives in Saint Petersburg, at the age of 29, Marius Petipa is just an obscure dancer who fled western Europe to escape his debts. He is far from imagining that his engagement in the troupe of the Russian Imperial Ballet, then rather mediocre, will reveal him, forty years later, as one of the greatest choreographers in the history of dance. It is within the Bolshoi Kamenny theaters, then Mariinsky, in a still provincial capital where three productions a year are enough to satisfy an undemanding audience, that this native of Marseille will invent a new art of ballet, over the course of sixty of creations, between 1862 (La fille du pharaon) and 1895 (Le lac des cygnes).
The two decades following the Russian revolution are marked by a gang of young people who profoundly influenced Russian Cinema. This artistic revolution was led by directors, actors, technicians and poets. They are the characters and voices of our film. The Soviet Actress, Ada Voistik, and its camrades tell us the story of this unique period, through the images of soviet fic-tional works produced between 1917 and 1934. We can thus catch a glimpse of their fight for a new society, where creative freedom was of utmost im-portance. A utopia which will be brought down by an authoritarian power impacting cinema as much as the rest of society.
Xavier Legrand (born 28 March 1979; Melun) is a French actor, direcor and screenwriter. Legrand was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for the 2013 film Avant que de tout perdre (Just Before Losing Everything). His first feature Custody was in competition at the 74th Venice Film Festival and earned Legrand the Silver Lion for Best Director.