IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0543882/
Date of Birth:2 December 1963, Lvov, Lvovskaya oblast, Ukrainskaya SSR, USSR [now Lviv, Lvivska oblast, Ukraine]
Russian citizen and Soviet-born Ukrainian native Vitaly Mansky crisscrosses Ukraine to explore Ukrainian society after the Maidan revolution as mirrored within his own large Ukrainian family. They live scattered all across the country: in Lviv, Odessa, the separatist area in Donbass, and Sevastopol on Crimea. The film is looking for reasons of the conflict after which citizens of a single country found themselves on a different sides of barricades including director's own family. The main narrative takes place in the here and now, starting with the turning point of ex-president Victor Yanukovych's flight to Russia. But below the main narrative there is a strong historical undercurrent, because the lives of protagonists of the film are marked by history on every step they take. This undercurrent will carry information about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict's deep roots in centuries of close ties between the two countries.
Vitaly Mansky embarks on a journey to track down his old school friends and fellow Young Pioneers with whom, as a child growing up in Lvov, Ukraine, he pledged allegiance to the Soviet motherland and the principles of communism.
Many would later flee the Soviet Union with their parents to begin new lives in Israel. Others, like the Mansky family, changed their names, wiped away the traces of their Jewish family history and stayed.
Mansky travels to Israel, USA, Canada and Ukraine in search of those he once knew so well, to explore their shared past and to discuss dreams and disappointments, discrimination and dominance, homeland and happiness.
On December 31, 1999 Vladimir Putin ascended to the president's chair in Russia. In his latest picture renowned documentarist Vitaly Mansky draws on witness accounts of the events that happened in the years following that fateful day. He then rounds it out with his own fascinating perspective and with the longtime unique experience of a man whom only a movie camera separated from upper echelon politics.