Arquivo

To make this documentary, Finnish film maker Pirjo Honakasalo made his way, in secret, to Chechen, defying the prohibition by Russian authorities as regards the presence of foreigners. The film shows the build-up of mutual hate between two peoples, hate cultivated as from childhood. In the first segment, the film focuses on a Russian military academy in Kronstadt, in the vicinity of St Petersburg, where many of the cadets are sons of soldiers and officers killed in Chechen. The second segment centers on Grozny, the Chechen capital, practically a ghost town, reduced to ruins, where the few inhabitants are women and children engaged in an almost hopeless search for shelter and clean water. The third segment of the film is set in a Chechen orphanage where some of the children do not even know who they are, and others were victims of rape.