SUMMER / ЛЕТО

Leningrad, one Summer in the early Eighties. The underground rock scene is boiling.
Amongst the followers of Led Zeppelin and Bowie, young Viktor Tsoi is eager to make a name for himself.
The encounter with his idol Mike and his beautiful wife Natasha will change his life forever. Together they will build Viktor’s legend and make him immortal.

„The setting is Leningrad (as it then was) in the early 1980s, when there was a fiercely committed rock and pop scene, with devotees fanatically consuming the latest imported albums and audiocassette bootlegs from the west, from the classics like the Beatles, Dylan, Velvet Underground, Bowie and the Doors, through to punk and new wave masters like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Blondie; just reciting those names was enough to send you into a kind of trance. This was the generation that waited in line for the new Stones LP on vinyl, not the new iPad on which tens of thousands of songs could be casually played at a click.

Serebrennikov shows that rock’n’roll was a real vocation. These people were like the early Christians, worshipping in secret. And what they were doing was removing the first bricks from the Berlin Wall. The alpha male in this world is Mike (Roman Bilyk), a singer with a wildly popular band who lives with his beautiful girlfriend, Natasha (Irina Starshenbaum), and their baby in a cramped shared apartment. With his sunglasses and longish hair, the rock singer that Mike most resembles, incidentally, is Mud lead singer Les Gray. But there is a newcomer, Viktor (Teo Yoo) who hero-worships Mike and has a band of his own. Natasha takes a shine to Viktor, and pretty soon they are in a Patty Boyd/Eric Clapton/George Harrison situation. And, all the time, their dedication to rock could cause them to be accused of being traitors and western stooges.“

Peter Bradshaw, TheGuardian