This film is based on a novel by Boris Vasiliev and takes place in a small Russian provincial town in 1940, one year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The every day life of class 9B is a larger than life portrait of Stalininism and of unconditional loyalty to party dogma.
At a birthday party a girl, one of the students, recites poetry by a “bourgeois” author. The information leaks out and her liberal father is arrested as a dissident. The daughter is faced by the class teacher and asked to publicly renounce her father which leads to a tragedy. This causes both inner and outer conflicts, the colleagues start to rebel and to question their loyalty, be it to the class teacher or the soviet ideology itself.Read More »