Svetlana Léon

Contemporary Paris, mid-July. Guillaume arrives in the capital to caretake a large apartment until the end of the summer. Lucie, the apartment’s owner, and a friend of his mother’s, welcomes him… then suddenly disappears.

Two brothers, Pierre and Vladimir, wonder if their Russian grandparents, Lily and Constantin, worked for the Soviet secret services in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Their research begins in Russia. After meetings and conversations, yellowish photos and vodka glasses, a lost world begins to emerge harassing the present.

Two sons, Pierre and Vladimir, question their father, Max Léon, about his biography in a domestic environment. What could be a simple family chat expands to the complex dimensions of history, since his life is that of a certain destiny, first involved in the resistance, then as a major activist in the Communist Party. The two archivists widen the circle to listen to the testimonies of their mother, Svettlana, their sister, Michèle, and other witnesses, comrades in utopia: Jacques Rossi, a former Komintern agent deported to the Gulag, and Marina Vlady, who lived in the USSR in the 1930s and was the wife of the protest singer Vladimir Vyssotsky. History is filtered through conversations that do not exclude silence or questioning. – FIDMarseille

Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield suddenly decide to abandon their suffocating universe. They embark on a trip around the world in search of an impossible sanctity.