After two years of military service, Sergei returns home to his mother and sister. His long-time friends Slava and Nikolai, a married worker and an intellectual, are also waiting for him in the Moscow district of Zastava Il'iča. Sergei falls in love, but cannot come to terms with love and his new Soviet life.
Young Muscovites and their search for meaning are at the center of this atmospheric epic and “central massif” of thaw cinema. Individuals emerge here who have what it takes to become figures of identification. The difficulties of the young, fatherless generation are brought to the fore in a dream sequence in particular: the twenty-year-old hero Sergei meets his younger father, who died in the Second World War in 1941. The censorship authorities described this sequence in particular as “provocative” and also took exception to others in which the most important representatives of the Moscow art scene at the time appear.
Chuciev's masterpiece was the first thaw film to be banned. The director reworked the film for two years and presented a shortened version in 1964 under the title I am Twenty (Mne dvadcat' let). Stadtkino is showing the original, uncut version of the film, restored in 1987-88.
