Maimed and broken soldiers return home from Afghanistan, and there is neither pomp nor joy in this return. For the men and their mothers, there is only a complete lack of understanding of the reasons for the bloodshed and the high price they have had to pay for the war. Yet the force of personal drama is such that it overcomes fear of the system that seeks to silence the tragedy.
The Afghan war became one of the most powerful factors in the collapse of the USSR, as Ukrainian mothers and society as a whole began to realise that their children were being killed for someone else’s imperial illusions.
The film has been digitised from a 35 mm positive print using a Blackmagic Cintel Scanner in 2026 by the Dovzhenko Centre Film Laboratory in cooperation with NGO Docudays, with financial support from the European Union.
