In 2015, while Maya worked as a researcher for a documentary film director, she came across an article about the Opera and Ballet Theatre of Donetsk. The war in Ukraine had been raging for a year, Donetsk was under siege, bombarded day and night, but the theatre kept on resisting, stubbornly performing its repertoire in the deserted city. Directors notes
History professor L. M. Rutenburg, a Russian émigré and repented westerner, recklessly fires himself from the Sorbonne to Donetsk, to conduct a research about the economic origins of the ongoing war. There, caught in the grip of the siege, the Donbass Opera company stubbornly prepares for a show: the Swan Lake. Synopsis
