Liza Kozlova

This is ‘a road movie’ encapsulated in the Moscow metro system and filmed over the course of one year: a documentary film that observes cultural and social issues in modern Russia.

In the event of natural disaster, turn off electricity and gas, hide your valuable objects, lock the house, climb onto the roof, and maybe you will survive. Natasha, 12 years old, knows these instructions by heart. So, while waiting for the storm, she laughs and fights, suffers heartbreak, attempts to negotiate the purchase of a new swimsuit with her father. With zest and delicacy, with clear complicity with the body of her young heroine, Elizaveta Kozlova captures the details of a day-to- day life which, although ordinary, never seems insipid, so deeply is it infused with the contagious energy of the protagonist. And as the lines of contemporary Russian society and its problems are sketched out, In the Eye of the Storm reveals itself as the portrait of a character undergoing tremendous change.

The main character of the film, Alexander Strizhenova, became famous in talk shows and tabloid media as the daughter of a Soviet actress, Natalya Strizhenova, who grew up without a father - but this is not mentioned in the film by Rastorguev. Sasha, beaten by life, when we meet her, lives in a cluttered and untidy village house somewhere in the Moscow Region with her husband, with whom they swear dirtyly in the presence of their young son Ilya. Sasha smokes, drinks and endlessly suffers from a lack of love and from the fact that no one can understand it. Three years later, the viewer again sees her life - in another place, with another man and with a new child, but in about the same circumstances.

Djus, a thief with the soul of a filmmaker, uses a smuggled phone to record himself from inside prison, recounting a love story that has stayed with him long after the bars closed behind him. In the film the character and the director together explore and articulate the meaning of love.