While Nikita joins the Belarusian army, Stvetlana struggles to make amends for her son's suicide, a victim of a military tradition of violent harassment.
While young Nikita enlists for compulsory military service in the Belarusian army, Svetlana struggles, day after day, to receive a gesture of legal reparation for the suicide of her son, a victim of "dedovshcina", in the same army. “Dedovshcina" is a tradition of violent harassment, torture, abuse and bullying that is supposed to turn boys into men and has a long history originating in the Soviet era. The stories of Nikita and Svetlana are interwoven in a film that ends up showing how this violence, accepted and passed down from generation to generation, is also a mechanism of fear used by the Belarusian government to control its people. A portrait of contemporary Belarus and the violence that runs through it that went on to win the first DOX: AWARD at the CPH:DOX 2023.
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