The documentary is an insight into the streets of Moscow, with its fighting and politics, before Boris Jeltsin was elected Russian president in 1993.
In 1993 internal politicking in Russia grew into confrontations which at its peak was called ”The Battle for the White House” although the tanks were operating in Moscow, not Washington. The fighting between the party wings didn’t start to happen over night. Battles had been escalating in the streets of the Russian capital for months.
“At that time, I was filming a historical documentary set in the totalitarian times. The omnipresent street bustle made us turn the camera towards the present events. Afterwards we modified these materials depicting the street fights into a shape formally inspired by the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s in which the street drama was emphasized by graphically adapted subtitles. Translations of mottos and songs caught in corridors of Moscow created a dateless montage. At the moment when tanks joined the street fights and a real conflict came to Moscow, our documentary was presented at the Rome festival. We definitely won the main prize ‘Prix Italia’ mainly for the foresight of its development.”

Pavel Stingl