A theatre legend dies. Her successor stages a play about broken families. Life imitates art HARD.
Viktor Ryzhakov takes charge of the Sovremennik theatre after the death of Galina Volchek, who led the troupe for almost half a century and enjoyed absolute authority. For the theatre’s first new production, the new artistic director chooses a play about a family whose members have ceased to understand each other. While working on the play, the director and actors become more and more like the characters in the future production, and find it increasingly difficult to find mutual understanding within their “theatrical family.”
Direction
Efimov lets reality collapse into fiction with zero warning.
Acting
Sovremennik legends playing themselves playing others—layers upon layers.
Director
Nikita Efimov
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Sovremennik was founded in 1956 as a rebellion against Soviet theatrical orthodoxy; Volchek transformed it into an institution. Ryzhakov inheriting it represents generational tension in Russian culture itself.
The play-within-the-film is never named, letting viewers project their own family dysfunction onto the blurred reality.
RU
