This elderly woman keeps the economy of a large family. Yes, it cannot be otherwise, because she is a strong person, she survived the death of her husband, and persecution, and the change of eras, and the change of rulers. And a change of country. She is Russian, but she lived her life among the Kurds, in a Kurdish village in Iraq. Her life is now seen through the eyes of an unknown narrator, who has the voice of director Sokurov and comes from a clan of great narrators of Russian literary classics, including official Zaitsev and veteran of the Caucasian wars Maxim Maksimych.

The Blockade Book was compiled by prominent Soviet writers Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin from letters, memoirs, memoirs of the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad, encircled by the blockade during the Second World War. The inhabitants of the city, which became the European image of Russian culture, were left to the mercy of evil fate, to starvation and deprivation, to die under enemy bombs, to fight barbarism. Cut off from the rest of the country for 872 days, they found themselves in inhuman conditions, incompatible with life and daily tempting human dignity.

The film tells about the life of the outstanding musicians of the 20th century Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich. The film uses footage.

The May demonstration of workers and fireworks, one of the ritual holidays in the USSR, Sokurov shoots as the wrong side of the official genre of Soviet newsreels. He showed the parade of national unity as a tired extras, disintegrating without a director's guiding hand and without a goal. You can write a mountain of philosophical and sociological works, title them "The Psychology of the Crowd" or "The Revolt of the Masses", but still you will not say more about the people gathered in the crowd than is said in this film.