Little Moscow

In 1967 Legnica is the town Poles call Little Moscow, because it holds the Red Army’s largest garrison outside the Soviet Union; local people cannot enter the garrison. Wiera, the wife of the Soviet pilot Jura, meets the Polish officer Michał at a cultural event arranged to ease relations between the two sides, and a closeness begins between them through music. This relationship, which neither state would forgive, reaches into the military order and into both families. The account opens and closes in 2008, with her daughter of the same name trying to understand the past. Waldemar Krzystek’s hundred and fourteen minute Polish Russian co-production started from a true story still told in Legnica. Svetlana Khodchenkova plays Wiera and Lesław Żurek plays Michał; it was completed in 2008 and won the Golden Lion at Gdynia.