L’Amiral Tchoumakov

This portrait of Tchumakov is nostalgic in the best sense of the word: Always dressed in uniform, with an admiral's hat atop his head, his attire comes across strange in a country hoping to reinvent itself. When he and his fellow former servicemen look back into the past, they tend to see things through rose-tinted glasses. Just like the history of the country he grew up in, the admiral is akin to something from another world; second-hand goods now discarded on the scrapheap of modern society. When Tchumakov talks about the past, the grandchildren hang on his every word. His pride however comes across without a strong sense of nostalgia for the Communist past. Instead viewers are confronted with an individual whose inner compass still works, even though his homeland now goes under a different name.