A teenager rebelling against her strict guardian. A tale as old as time, yet set against the brutal Stalin purge. A theme of this film is Juli's silence. Everyone's always asking why she's so quiet. She alludes to an answer about 3/4 of the way in:
"When the war broke out, every single soul around me was crying. Children, women, men. And many of them died. And I stayed alive."
Apathy in a world that demands conformity is sometimes the best rebellion, or at least it may mean survival.
