Anna Evtushenko

Konstantin Simonov, a writer, and Pavel Troshkin, a photo correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper, were friends and were together during the heavy fighting at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War - the Buynichskoe Field near Mogilev in Belarus. Their families continued to keep in touch after the World War II. They were connected with each other both in work and in peaceful life. Konstantin Simonov's son Alexei and Pavel Troshkina's granddaughter Elena tell about the friendship that lasted almost a century.

The film tells about the unique Russian village of Alexandrovka, located in Potsdam, in the very center of Germany. This Russian settlement, built at the beginning of the 19th century, to this day keeps the memory of its distant homeland. The village was built specifically for 26 Russian soldiers with families - singing choir. Their descendants survived in this village until the 21st century. Unexpected relations of Russians and Germans, the intersection of "destinies, events" from the beginning of the XIX century to the present day.

In the year of Leo Tolstoy's death, Dziga Vertov, an unknown boy from Bialystok, was 14 years old. The elder of Yasnaya Polyana could not know either the name or the work of the documentary filmmaker, the founder of non-fiction cinema as a high art. However, the film is structured as a parallel movement of creative aspirations, views and biographies of two artists. In his best paintings ("Kinoglaz", "Man with a Movie Camera", "Symphony of Donbass" and others), Vertov followed the basic aesthetic principles of Tolstoy, supported and developed the traditions of Russian classical literature on the screen. One of the main episodes of the film is a screen story about the Moscow agricultural exhibition of 1923, which reveals the common focus of the writer and director's efforts.

Guests and hosts of Leo Tolstoy's family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, testify to how photographers came to them to "take portraits" of Leo Tolstoy and his household. How did the efforts of those who came end, and what is a "photographers' attack"? Was the blue blouse in which Tolstoy first appeared in Prokudin-Gorsky's color photograph blue? The filmmakers expressed their appreciation and gratitude to Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Rashomon, presenting the same events in Yasnaya Polyana through the eyes of famous contemporaries of the great Russian writer.