Based on diaries and photographs of the director’s grandfather and mother, the film reconstructs the life of one family within the never-ending cycle of destruction and restoration in her hometown — Mariupol. Today, the director is left with nothing except her memories. And she is not the only one: while we are watching the film, somewhere there is a war.
Extracting fragments of collective and personal family memory step by step, the film reconstructs the building of the totalitarian system. We see the emerging life of Mariupol around the Azovstal plant, where two generations of the director's family lived and worked. The story begins when the director's grandfather, under threat of execution, was taken from his native village to rebuild the Azovstal plant in 1944. Accompanied by coercion, threats, and propaganda, people were building two machines of death — a totalitarian system and a metallurgical giant. Since, these machines have been working like crematoriums, using people as fuel, and producing dust and soot. And now, Azovstal is fully destroyed by the army of the same totalitarian system.
Submit your project to the catalog
