Original title: Rayski ptashky
Copyright: Sota Cinema Group, Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine, 2008
Format: full-length feature
Carrier: DVD
Color: color
Length: 94 min.
Original language: Ukrainian
English subtitles: yes

Film crew
Director: Roman Balayan
Script writer: Rustam Inbragimbekov, based on the story “Waltz for Co.” and “From Nowhere with Love” by Dmitriy Savitskiy
Cinematographer: Bohdan Verzhbytskyi
Production design: Volodymyr Karashevskyi
Composer: Vadym Kharpachov

Film cast
Anrey Kuzichev, Oksana Akinsha, Oleg Yankovskiy, Yegor Pazenko, Serhiy Romaniuk.

Synopsis
The events of the film take place in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. It is forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations, it is not safe to voice one’s opinions in front of strangers. Words of truth are spoken only in private kitchens behind the curtained windows. They also seep out onto the hand-typed pages of the samizdat literature. They are passed around quietly, secretly and only to trusted friends for fear of persecution. The KGB tap phones, survey the ‘unreliable’ and consistently step by step destroy all forms of decent. The protagonists challenge the inhumane state machine, putting on stake their very lives and proving that nothing and nobody can stop a person who is on his way to achieve a true freedom.
Says Roman Balayan, “It is important for me to make a picture that confronts and pushes the viewer to face their own feelings and thoughts. It is important that even the most thick-skinned person feel what it means to have no freedom, to be under censorship, so that the times when people could not speak the truth stay for ever in the past.”