Soviet noir where idealism meets the gutter — and the gutter wins.
After the Bolshevik coup Alexei Tolmachev comes to enter the university. However, he becomes a chekist and receives his first assignment - to establish a connection with the Odesa conspirators and to gather the atamans in the city to finish off the bandits in one go...
Cinematography
Odesa's crumbling grandeur shot like a ghost haunting itself.
Acting
Ganshin's descent from believer to instrument is quietly devastating.
Direction
Isakov makes state terror feel like suffocating routine.
Director
Valeri Isakov
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made during the Prague Spring's aftermath, the film's cynicism about revolutionary purity was dangerously subversive for Soviet cinema.
Isakov shot on location in Odesa's actual catacombs where partisans once hid, lending documentary unease to the fiction.
SU
