Moscow at the beginning of the 1970s. The film tells the story of a classic love triangle – two friends and a girl that both of the boys are in love with. They are all students at the same school where they earn their first triumphs and experience their first disappointments together. Sergei sells his grandfather’s books to buy jeans to seduce his female group-mates. He buys prohibited by the government LP’s by “The Rolling Stones” and goes to see theater plays by unfavorable directors. After breaking up with his girlfriend, he travels to the sea and makes a drunken braw. While busy with personal lives and loves, the young miss foreseeing that the Sovet Union empire, in which they were born and live will soon disappeared from the map… This is a story about young love and ordinary events, but in the background one can already hear the rumblings of the approaching historical upheaval.

“I think the reason that empires disintegrate is not due to negotiations between world leaders or what happens on the front pages of the newspapers. I think the fate of empires and what changes them is born from small things that seem insignificant at the time. For me the appearance of a rock music group at my school was a much more indicative moment in the history of the disappearance of the empire called USSR than reorganization, economic recession and the other large scale events that historians like to write about.”

Karen Shakhnazarov