Leningrad, one summer in the early 80s. Smuggling LP’s by Lou Reed and David Bowie, the underground rock scene is boiling ahead of the Perestroika. Mike and his beautiful wife Natasha meet with young Viktor Tsoï. Together with friends, they will change the destiny of rock’n’roll in the Soviet Union.

Born in 1969 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Kirill Serebrennikov is a Russian theater, television and film director. He has been the artistic director of the Gogol Center in Moscow since 2012. He staged his first play when he was still a student. In 1992, he graduated with a Major in Physics from the Rostov State University.

In 2008, he formed an experimental actor-director class at the Moscow Art Theatre School, which later became the Seventh Studio, now a Gogol Center full-time resident. From 2011 to 2014, Serebrennikov was the artistic director of the Platform project at the Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art. In 2015, the Gogol Center presented Serebrennikov’s play “Idiots” at the Avignon Festival, inspired by the eponymous Lars Von Trier film. In 2016 Kirill Serebrennikov returned to Avignon to present “Dead Souls” based on the classic novel by Nikolai Gogol. He is the first Russian director to participate in the event for over a decade, and two years in a row.

In 2016, THE STUDENT premiered in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, and was awarded the Francois Chalais prize. LETO is his first feature to be presented in Cannes’ main competition.

On August 23 2017, Kirill Serebrennikov was arrested during production, as LeETO was reaching the end of principal photography. He has since then been in Moscow, where he edited his film under house arrest.