Dear Comrades!

Novocherkassk, 1962. Prices rise, wages fall, and the workers at the locomotive plant go on strike. Lyudmila, a party member in the city administration, is on the side of order, including against her son, her neighbours and her own history. Then the army fires on the crowd and her daughter disappears. Andrei Konchalovsky tells it in black and white in a narrow frame, faithful to the visual language of the period. The strength is in Lyudmila's contradiction: she keeps defending the system she has believed in for years while investigating whether that same system destroyed her child. The massacre was concealed in the Soviet Union for decades and the files only opened after the Union fell. It took the special jury prize at Venice. Who it is for: viewers interested in Soviet history and in the tension between belief and complicity. Who it is not for: anyone wanting pace, since the film carries its weight deliberately.