A story of the Siberian province. Girls passed directly on from orphanage to neuropsychiatric institutions are deprived of their rights as citizens: no freedom, no work, and no family. The path to reconquer these rights, in the face of fearsome Russian institutional bureaucracy, is long and difficult. At times, someone succeeds, but the new freedom is then a leap into the unknown.
At the morgue of Santiago de Chile, the day after the World coup, Hector Herrera identifies the body of the committed singer Victor Jara. Refusing to see this body disappear like the others, he manages, at the risk of his life, to bury him. 40 years later, Hector returns to this act of disobedience.
Riad, a middle-aged man, holds a firearm shop in a neighbourhood of Beirut. When he meets up with his friends or goes hunting with them, it is often with the aim of evoking together their memories of the civil war fought in the Christian militia. They live in nostalgia for the war that impassioned their youth. Director Myriam El Hajj builds solid architectural images that interrogate — and, perhaps, over time even manage to articulate — the intimate origins of violence that never seems to depart and a past that doesn't want to let go of the present.
