Punky biopic about the underground music scene in Leningrad just before Perestroika, based on the early years of pop icon Viktor Tsoï and his legendary band Kino. In the early 1980s, he befriends the charismatic singer of the band Zoopark, who has managed to pick up rare records by Bowie, Blondie and T. Rex. They decide to shake things up with their own performances, but for now their young audience is allowed only to move their feet to the rhythm. With humour and guts, the band members tackle censorship, even if only in their imagination.
In lush black-and-white, Leto captures the energy of a long summer: making music together in cramped apartments and cautious rebellion, alternating with wildly scratched images and surrealistic interludes of train passengers singing along to Psycho Killer by Talking Heads. Due to absurd and perhaps politically charged allegations of fraud, acclaimed film and theater director Kirill Serebrennikov (The Student) was placed under house arrest at the end of filming Leto. He was still able to finish the editing at home.