Granny Tusya, who has cared for her sick daughter and her grandchildren her whole life and even dug trenches in the battle for Stalingrad, is forced out of her house at an advanced age by her daughter-in-law and sent to her sister. Then she moves on from one inhospitable relative to another. The ingratitude of her family, for whom Granny has become a burden, is a model for the decay of family life in today’s Russia. The old peasant woman forms a stark contrast with materialist urban yuppies who do not welcome Granny. Among poor Chechen refugees, she gets a much warmer welcome. The role of Granny Tusya is played by a nonprofessional actor, Nina Shoubina, whose eloquence can partly be found in the powerful expressions on her deeply lined face. Bobrova’s film shows the difficult life of Russian old people, who do not have much to expect from their family or from the state. Bobrova let the old woman look back with some nostalgia to the Soviet past. The film can also be regarded as Bobrova’s homage to the female front: the Russian women who kept the country going during the Second World War.
