Astrakhan is the Russian city, 1979 the year remembered. A year and a half and a journey covering many kilometers, from Moscow to the Caspian Sea, to Azerbaijan. The beginning of the voyage is the search for a haven. Martim’s parents, who was 15 years old then, are militants of the Communist Party and see the Soviet Union as an ideal to aspire to. At the age of 57, Martim recalls his clandestine life, the studies and passions left behind and the ideal lost to time.
A hybrid coming of age around the story of Martim who at the age of 15, in 1979, a few years after the carnation revolution in Portugal, goes to Astrakhan in Russia to do formal studies in the fishing métier. Personal history mixed with socio-political History, the communist ideal and soviet union reality, past taboos resonate in the present and an intergenerational chain of understatements and omissions is finally brought gently to the front in a frank conversation between father and son. The proposal sets off from supposed postcards the young teenager wrote his parents, recreates the travel and stay there through archive material and segments of poetic reenactment… until we meet him again back in present time opening up to his son about this adventure and how it impacted him and the family. It’s in this act of sharing that we hear the echo of the unspoken through generations. (Susana Santos Rodrigues)
