Leto

Filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov brings a strong sense of time and place to this film about the passionate but clandestine music scene in early 1980s Leningrad. The movie, focused on real-life rock star Viktor Tsoi, also depicts the birth of the Soviet rock scene, forced underground. For the fans, music was a real vocation, to be treasured despite the risks. The film about cultural identity and freedom is all the more vivid given its director has spent over a year under house arrest. 

Serebrennikov shows that rock’n’roll was a real vocation. These people were like the early Christians, worshiping in secret. And what they were doing was removing the first bricks from the Berlin Wall.

The Guardian