Lyudmila Snigireva

His motto was laconic: "I promised - stay still." This is how Alexei Balabanov lived, raised his sons, was friends, and so filmed. A legendary director and an extraordinary person who made both "festival" and "mass" films with equal ease. He was a great father and a difficult husband, a loyal friend and an honest guy. Balabanov with his life, passions, losses, burning pain on the way to God in the memories of those closest to him - mother, sons, wife and friends. He seems to be telling the crew again: "Let's do it talentedly!"

The film is based on a unique, fundamentally new source of information about the Great Patriotic War. This is an interview with 17 thousand fighters, recorded right during the fighting. These sometimes incredible stories allow you to reveal the course of the entire war in a new way: to tell about the feelings and experiences of the fighters; about facts that contradict official history; about how war has suddenly become part of the daily lives of millions of people. The most unexpected, vivid and revealing stories from this unique archive will be voiced by popular artists. Also, the few veterans who have survived to this day will take part in the film, the protocols of conversations with which have been preserved in the archive.