Michèle Léon

Pierre Léon ingeniously condenses and updates Dostoevsky’s novel about a 19-year-old intellectual reconnecting with his estranged family in his impressive debut feature.

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