

A teenage girl bets everything that riot cops still have souls. Spoiler: they don't show them.
A girl from St. Petersburg walks around protest-ridden Moscow, talking to riot police and believing that sooner or later they will go over to the side of the demonstrators. An 18-year-old student of a St. Petersburg college introduces herself as Alice and tells about herself that from the age of four she lived in an orphanage and in foster families. In Moscow, Alisa, for whom this is the first rally in her life, walks along the police cordons and looks under the OMON helmet. "Under the mask you can't see, are you even human?"
Direction
Kiselev lets silence do the screaming. Devastating restraint.
Production
Shot in actual 2019 Moscow protests. The danger is documentary-real.

Director
Andrey Kiselev
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Filmed during the 2019 Moscow election protests, when thousands demanded opposition candidates be allowed to run—this is living history that aged terribly fast.
Alice's orphanage backstory isn't random: state care to state confrontation, she's been managed by systems her whole life. The film knows this and doesn't say it aloud.
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