A traitor's voice betrays him in a world where science serves the state.
Diplomat Volodin is going to work in the States for a responsible job. But, having crossed the ocean, he immediately went over to the Americans. And not empty-handed: he calls the American embassy from a pay phone and gives the appearance of a Soviet intelligence officer. The traitor is sure that he will not be identified “by the phone's strangled voice. There can be no such technology. But, on the instructions of the Chekists, such a technique was developed in Marfino's "sharashka" near Moscow by convict engineers and scientists.
Acting
Mironov's trembling confidence as a man who miscalculated everything.
Direction
Panfilov's clinical, suffocating atmosphere of institutional power.
Director
Gleb Panfilov
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Marfino's 'sharashka' was real—a prison research facility where Soviet scientists like Solzhenitsyn developed military tech under duress. The film confronts how intellectual labor serves oppression.
Gleb Panfilov spent years developing this passion project; it was one of the most expensive Russian films of its era, partly due to meticulous period reconstruction of 1940s Washington and Moscow.
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