Moscow, winter 2021: At TV Rain, the only remaining independent channel, young journalists have been branded “foreign agents”— targeted for surveillance or worse, and required to tag their reporting with a disclaimer that they are serving foreign powers. Regardless: Ksyusha furiously produces and edits stories to distract herself from her fellow-journalist fiancé’s imprisonment; Anya hosts everyday heroes of resistance on her interview show, while shielding both her sanity and her young daughter from the regime’s relentless “fuckery”; Sonya produces the “Hi, You’re a Foreign Agent” podcast at her kitchen table while beholding her empty living room (why buy a sofa when who knows what will happen to her?); Alesya fends off anxiety that her office has been bugged, while hiding her relationship with her girlfriend from her traditional mother. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just weeks away, as these Gen-Z heroines confront propagandist absurdity and personal endangerment, fighting for the soul of a country they love to the bitter end. An extraordinary historic record and an immersive and intimate inside view of the opposition in an authoritarian society, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day.

Galina Starovoitova entered politics two years before the collapse of the USSR, at the time of radical changes in the country; and all her activities over the course of ten years, until the moment of the murder, was both a hit on time and a fantastic advance. She was a real politician of the 90s, built a young Russian democracy, looked to the future with hope, soberly and bitterly assessing the present. But she can also be safely called a politician of the XXI century: Galina Starovoitova spoke about the most important current problems of our society, ahead of her time by several decades.

In 2020, the world realized that the Soviet Union, which seemed to have ceased to exist in 1991, did not disintegrate and continues to crumble with blood. In September 2020, the second Karabakh war broke out. Almost thirty years elapsed between it and the first war. In this film, Armenians and Azerbaijanis speak, those who found the first Karabakh war thirty years ago as children. They did not have time to learn either about territorial integrity or about the people's right to self-determination. They did not have time to learn their version of history. They did not have the opportunity to understand what and why the war was going on, because some of them simply did not know the meaning of the word "war". Thirty years later, the war returned to them again, or never stopped, it's just that no one except them noticed.