Svetlana Léon

Deux frères, Pierre et Vladimir, se demandent si leurs grands-parents russes ont travaillé pour les services secrets soviétiques durant les années 30 et 40 à Paris. Ils partent enquêter en Russie. Au fil des rencontres et des conversations, des photos jaunies et des verres de vodka, les mondes perdus ressurgissent et viennent hanter le présent.

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

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.