Everything Could Have Been Otherwise

1971, Odesa Film Studio. The KGB studio curator orders a re-edit of just finished movie about the events of Ukraine’s 1920s "civil war" of a young director in line with the Party’s view on the historical events. This re-editing work is entrusted to a young female editor, which consequently realizes she must protect the director’s vision and the safe-guard the truth about her country under Soviet occupation.

Once upon a time there lived a young man who served where “enemy voices” were suppressed, wrote, and wanted to make a film. It seemed to him that complete freedom was needed in order not to let his abilities die out, so that there were no obstacles to creativity.

Summer of 1940. The architect returns from Bucharest to his native Bessarabia with a firm desire to live outside politics. However, life forces him to make a choice.

There are a small number of people for whom imagery and symbolism alone are sufficient reason to watch an otherwise difficult film such as this one. In the story, a boy, a woman and a cow seem to be the only survivors of a global catastrophe, except for whoever is following them threateningly in a tank.

August 1943, Europe. The tentacles of the German octopus have begun to recoil. As the Nazis retreat, their concern focuses on the supply of oil from the refineries of Romania. Without the flow of "black gold", Germany's doom is sealed. Armadas of American bombers from bases in North Africa have begun to assault Pioesti - and there is another threat from the Partisans across the border of Yugoslavia. Against the tableau of spectacular events, the dramatic story of WILD WIND unfolds.

A state of emergency has been declared in the Republic of Moldova due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The film director, together with his family, leaves the city and takes refuge in the countryside for the duration of the lockdown. There, faced with the new realities of life, the director conceives a new film about the creative artist’s mission in the modern world, where immorality and a lack of spirituality now prevail. The artist, who has dedicated his entire body of work to his love for humanity, is forced to accept an open confrontation with a new force that threatens civilisation…

The film is set in a provincial Moldovan town. Seventeen-year-old Milika, a school leaver, has not yet decided on her future career. But that is not her main problem. Milika is more concerned about the discord within her family — it is becoming clear to her that her mother and father no longer love each other. She takes a job at a poultry farm, but the work does not satisfy her. She joins the DOSAAF parachuting club, where she meets Dumitru, a soon-to-be conscript.

The town of Zinkiv, where people of different nationalities and religions lived in harmony and peace in the 1950s, is actually a paradise that was not on the map of the former USSR: mysteriously, it simply "fell" out of the field of vision of the totalitarian system. The Orthodox church, Jewish synagogue, Catholic church, and Islamic heritage site—an old Turkish fortress—coexisted peacefully and naturally there.