Overview

The film was conceived and shot in 1990/91 in the declining USSR, in Belarus, Russia, Siberia, Tajikistan and Lithuania, "to help us understand what is happening to us," according to screenwriters and Studio Tatyana frontwomen Ella Milova and Irina Pismennaja. It's a film letter from the perspective of Homo Sovieticus – but in the feminine plural, addressed to Helke Sander and other "Western feminists" (the co-production was also shot in West Germany with the Bremen Institute for Film & Television). We see encounters with imprisoned women trapped with their children near Chornobyl; Tajik cotton pickers who tell of colonial exploitation; mothers of soldiers whose sons were killed in the army; women in slaughterhouses; party officials.