A Little Doll

Tanya is fifteen and a gymnast of world class. During a warm up she takes a serious injury to her spine. Her coach wants her to compete in spite of the pain; the prestige of the state is at stake. In the end the injury makes her leave the sport. Tanya goes back to her school in a small town, into the ninth grade. She tries to apply in school the competitive manner she learned in sport. But those rules do not work here, and they push the people around her away. Her physical strength and the things she brought back from abroad draw both admiration and resentment. The film raises the side of top level sport that was not talked about. Isaak Fridberg’s hundred and twenty seven minute Soviet film was completed in 1988.