Константин Дмитриевич Воскресенский
Film Screenplay. The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy

Written by Konstantin Voskresenskiy

Based on the autobiography by Konstantin Voskresenskiy

Adapted for screen

Genre: Adventure / Drama / Coming-of-Age

Format: Feature Film

Runtime: 110–120 minutes

Rating: 16+

LOGLINE: In the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a stuttering, reckless boy named Kesha survives drowning, trains, elevators, military bases, and his own worst impulses – only to discover that the hardest thing to survive is growing up, and that the bottom is always closer than you think.

TAGLINE: A man is a boy who survived by accident.

Contact: voskon@gmail.com | Phone: +7 916 825 9840

Telegram: @Konstantin_Voskresenskiy

Revision Date: February 2026 | Draft: Third Draft

Explication – Director’s Vision

Written by Konstantin Voskresenskiy | February 2026

1. Theme

This is a film about the price of survival – and what it costs a boy to become a man when no one shows him how.

Set against the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos of the 1990s, the story asks a simple but devastating question: what happens to a child who is loved imperfectly, abandoned casually, and never told the truth – and who somehow turns all of that into a life worth living?

At its deepest level, this is a film about fathers and sons: the father who died before he could speak, and the son who spends his whole life finding his own words.

2. Idea / Super-Objective

The film’s super-objective: a man is not the sum of what was done to him, but the sum of what he chose to do next.

Kesha does not triumph over his circumstances. He absorbs them, converts them, and carries them forward. His stutter is not cured. His father does not come back. But by the end, he is standing on the same balcony where he grew up – and instead of running, he goes inside and adjusts his daughter’s blanket. That is the victory. Small, quiet, and absolute.

3. Conflict

EXTERNAL: Kesha vs. a country falling apart – Soviet institutions, absent parents, indifferent bureaucracies, the lawless 1990s. The world keeps removing the floor; he keeps finding new ground.

INTERNAL: Kesha vs. himself – reckless, stuttering, capable of tenderness and cruelty in the same afternoon. He fights shame, impulse, and the inability to ask for help.

INVISIBLE: Kesha vs. his dead father. Dmitriy’s absence structures the entire film. A letter never sent. A truth hidden for sixteen years. A son who becomes the father his father never got to be – without knowing that is what he is doing.

4. Main Characters

KESHA (KONSTANTIN VOSKRESENSKIY) – age 0 to 26. An engine disguised as a child: curious, reckless, resourceful, morally inconsistent, possessed of stubbornness that reads as courage until it reads as stupidity, and then, quietly, as courage again. His stutter is not merely a speech impediment – it is the physical manifestation of everything he cannot say: grief, need, love, apology. Throughline: survive – be free – be worthy of his daughter.

DMITRIY VOSKRESENSKIY (the father) – age 19 at death. Present only through absence. Writing letters his son will never receive. His death – five bullet wounds stamped as "fever" – is the wound Kesha must metabolize before he can become a father himself.

MOTHER – not a villain. A young woman who lost a husband at 22 and spent the next decade trying to stay afloat. Capable of love and neglect in the same afternoon.

STEPFATHER (SERGEY) – quiet, decent, never violent, emotionally absent. A study in the limits of good intentions: he gives Kesha space to grow up alone – which is both gift and wound.

GRANDMOTHER MARINA – formidable, loyal, Soviet steel with a human core. The family axis. She carries the truth about Dmitriy until Kesha is old enough to bear it.

GRANDFATHER NIKOLAY – a man unmade by grief and slowly remaking himself. His restraint is the film’s model of Soviet masculinity – and its damage.

5. Secondary Characters

ROMA – first accomplice; childhood freedom before consequence.

ZHENYA & ALEXEY – the "capitalism of survival" partners.

LT. COL. YARKIN – authority without cruelty; the father-shaped imprint.

MARIA (wife) – chosen life, not survived life; triggers the final emotional beat.

THE KITTEN – not a secondary character. A moral event.

6. Visual & Stylistic Concept

TONE: Warm, funny, occasionally heartbreaking – never sentimental. In the spirit of Jojo Rabbit meets Cinema Paradiso, filtered through a distinctly Russian sensibility.

COLOUR PALETTE (three registers):

– Childhood (1985–1995): warm, saturated – Soviet kitchens, blue-flower wallpaper, firelight, summer glare.

– Teens / 1990s: cooler grey-green – industrial dusk, railway platforms, empty courtyards.

– Adult frame: neutral, quiet, minimal – the calm after survival.

CAMERA: Handheld in childhood (the world moves because he moves), steadier with age. Close on faces for truth; wide in nature (pea fields, rivers, forests) to emphasise scale – the world is enormous, the boy is small.

7. Sound Design & Music

SCORE: Original soundtrack composed by Peter Svetlichnyi. A completed score for the autobiographical source material already exists, providing a musical foundation deeply embedded in the emotional DNA of the story.

MUSICAL CONCEPT:

– Childhood motifs: light, slightly ironic Soviet-era melodic themes, growing more complex as Kesha ages.

– Emotional weight: sparse piano and strings for pivotal scenes (the kitten; the father revelation; the Oka River).

– Adult frame: minimal, near-silent – the sound of having survived.

SOUND DESIGN: When the stutter locks, the world subtly muffles – a subjective, underwater quality pulling the audience into Kesha’s paralysis. Silence is structural: five seconds of black screen after the kitten scene carry no sound at all. Adult Kesha V.O. is warm but distant – a man speaking from the far shore of survival.

Synopsis

Genre: Adventure / Drama / Coming-of-Age

Format: Feature Film, 110–120 minutes

Rating: 16+

Based on: The autobiography by Konstantin Voskresenskiy

Tone: Warm, funny, occasionally heartbreaking – in the spirit of

Jojo Rabbit meets Cinema Paradiso, filtered through a distinctly Russian sensibility

In the summer of 1986, a nineteen-year-old Soviet soldier named Dmitriy Voskresenskiy is shot dead at a military outpost near the Chinese border. The government calls it hemorrhagic fever. His father Nikolay, who identifies the body in a Moscow morgue, counts five bullet wounds and says nothing. A death certificate is stamped. A life is erased. A boy named Kesha will grow up without knowing any of this.

One year earlier, in a cramped apartment in the Moscow suburb of Klimovsk, the family argues about what to name the baby. Three names go into a hat. God – or chance – picks Konstantin. The family calls him Kesha, like the cartoon parrot. The name will follow him everywhere, a joke that becomes an identity.

From the age of three, Kesha’s life is a chain of small disasters and improbable survivals. His mother remarries a man named Sergey – quiet, decent, never violent, but emotionally absent. At four, Kesha witnesses an apartment fire. One night he is simply forgotten at kindergarten, left alone until morning. At five, he is locked out of his apartment because both parents have passed out drunk. An old woman at a bus stop terrifies him so badly that he develops a stutter – a companion that will stay with him for life.

But Kesha is not a victim. He is an engine. At six, he talks his friend Roma into a bus ride to steal peas from a collective farm. At seven, he discovers the elevator game – riding on top of Soviet lift cabins in pitch darkness, inches from the shaft walls. At nine, in the darkest moment of his childhood, he drops a kitten from an eighth-floor balcony. The kitten survives, broken and mewing. Kesha never forgives himself. Twenty-four years later, when he holds a dying cat in a veterinary clinic, the echo returns – the same green eyes, the same unbearable guilt.

At ten, Kesha discovers capitalism. With friends Zhenya and Alexey, he collects bottles, steals scrap metal from military bases, builds a bench for elderly neighbours (who refuse to pay). He learns the first law of Russian business: always agree on the price beforehand.

At eleven, a dance troupe takes him to Budapest – his first foreign country. At a swimming pool, he jumps into the deep end without knowing how to swim. He nearly drowns, saved only by a metal handrail. Nobody notices.

That same summer, a teacher humiliates him at a children’s camp over clean hands. Something inside Kesha breaks – quietly, decisively. He walks out, through a forest, hitches a ride with a stranger, navigates the Moscow commuter rail network, and arrives at his grandmother’s apartment at midnight, covered in mud and leaves. He learns that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.

At twelve, he drifts into a lake on a metal platform and gives up. His body goes slack. He sinks. Then his knee hits the bottom. The water is chest-deep. He is drowning with the riverbed inches below his feet. This moment crystallises into a life principle: never give up before it’s time. Your knee might be about to hit the bottom.

The middle years bring friendship and betrayal. His best friend Alexey blames Kesha for a smoking incident that Alexey himself confesses to. The friendship ends without a word. In school, he fights a losing war against Russian grammar, Pushkin, and teachers who call on him six lessons in a row.

At fifteen, Kesha works nights as a security guard, sleeping on cardboard for three thousand rubles a month. He plays guitar in the Moscow Metro until thugs chase him away. His class leader, a retired Lieutenant Colonel named Yarkin, becomes the closest thing to a father he has ever known – a man who disciplines with his eyes alone.

At sixteen, his grandmother reveals the truth about his father: the bullet wounds, the gas attack, the government cover-up. The cold anger that settles in his bones never fades.

At eighteen, Kesha enters university and fails MATHAN three times before cracking it through sheer stubbornness. He solves physics over a pay phone with his friend dictating answers. The Dean – who clearly sees someone else’s handwriting on his paper – passes him anyway with a gentle pat on the shoulder. Kesha learns that power is most frightening when it chooses to be kind.

An electrical engineering failure leads to a job at Siemens. He marries Maria – a Russian Literature student, making Pushkin his eternal in-law – in a registry office wearing jeans and a denim jacket. The church wedding the next day shocks the relatives.

His career is a rollercoaster. Employee of the Month at Siemens one week, fired the next. Each setback is absorbed, processed, and converted into forward motion.

At twenty-six, his daughter Masha is born. He watches the birth – blue to pink in ten seconds, the whole story of being human compressed into a moment. His finger is grabbed by five miniature fingers, and the man who spent his life running comes to a complete stop.

Years later, on the same ninth-floor balcony where he grew up, Kesha stands with his wife. Their daughter sleeps inside. Maria tells him Masha asked about his father. He says, quietly: "A man is a boy who survived by accident. But a father is a man who survives on purpose."

He goes inside. Adjusts her blanket. Closes her book of fairy tales. Leaves a crack of light in the doorway – for her to find if she wakes in the dark.

LOGLINE: In the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a stuttering, reckless boy named Kesha survives drowning, trains, elevators, military bases, and his own worst impulses – only to discover that the hardest thing to survive is growing up, and that the bottom is always closer than you think.

Screenplay

Third Draft – February 2026

FADE IN:

Scene 1. INT. MILITARY BARRACKS, AMUR REGION – DAY (1986)

SUPER: "July, 1986. Amur Region, Russian Far East. One month before."

A cramped military bunk room. Posters of Soviet athletes on the walls. A radio crackles with Pugachova’s latest hit. Young soldiers lounge on iron beds in various states of boredom, polishing boots, writing letters, staring at the ceiling.

DMITRIY VOSKRESENSKIY (19) – handsome, dark-haired, impossibly young – sits on his bunk, writing a letter with careful, deliberate penmanship. A PHOTOGRAPH is taped to the wall beside him: a baby boy, chubby, laughing, wearing a ridiculous knitted hat.

His bunkmate SERYOGA (19) leans over.

SERYOGA

Writing to the wife again?

DMITRIY

(not looking up)

It’s for my son.

SERYOGA

He’s one year old, Dima. He can’t read.

DMITRIY

(smiling)

He will someday. I want him to know his father had neat handwriting.

Seryoga laughs. Dmitriy finishes writing. Folds the letter carefully. Puts it in an envelope. Looks at the photograph.

DMITRIY

(to the photo, quiet)

I’ll be home soon, Kesha. Hold on.

He touches the photograph with one finger. The baby is laughing at something off-camera. Dmitriy smiles. We hold on this image – a young father, impossibly young, reaching toward a son he will never hold again.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

He never came home. He never sent the letter. I found out about it thirty years later. By then, I had a daughter of my own. And I understood.

CUT TO:

Scene 2. EXT. MILITARY OUTPOST, AMUR REGION – NIGHT

SUPER: "August 20, 1986. 3,500 miles from Moscow."

The same base. Dead of night. A desolate compound on the Chinese border. Barbed wire fences disappear into fog. Barracks hunker low against the earth. Wind howls across the emptiness.

SILENCE. A dog barks somewhere. Then —

A single GUNSHOT cracks the night. Then another. Then chaos. Muzzle flashes strobe across terrified young faces. SOLDIERS scramble in the dark, shouting, tripping over each other. An alarm siren begins to wail.

In the confusion, we catch a glimpse of DMITRIY, stumbling out of his barracks in his undershirt. Blood blooms across his chest. Then his shoulder. Then his side. He reaches forward, toward nothing, and falls.

A COMMANDING OFFICER shouts orders nobody follows. Soldiers drag bodies. Someone is screaming for a medic. The screaming stops.

Smoke. Wind. Fog. Silence.

In the distance, a radio crackles – a tinny voice reading a situation report that nobody is alive to hear. The wind picks up, carrying ash and the smell of cordite across the compound. A single boot lies on the path between barracks, still laced, still warm.

Dawn breaks. Grey light seeps through the fog like diluted blood. MEDICS arrive in a covered truck, too late for everyone who matters. They carry stretchers with the bureaucratic efficiency of men who have done this before and will do it again.

CUT TO:

Scene 3. INT. MILITARY MORGUE, MOSCOW REGION – DAY

Fluorescent light. Tile walls. The smell of formaldehyde and institutional soap. A clock ticks on the wall. It is the only sound.

NIKOLAY TIMANOV (55), a weathered man with calloused hands and the bearing of someone who has worked outdoors his entire life, stands before a body covered by a white sheet. His jaw is clenched so tight the muscles in his neck stand out like cables. His cap is in his hands.

A MILITARY BUREAUCRAT (40s, bored, efficient, has done this a hundred times) holds a clipboard.

BUREAUCRAT

Timanov, Nikolay Petrovich? You are here to identify the remains of Private Dmitriy Anatol’evich Voskresenskiy?

Nikolay nods. Once.

His hands tremble as he reaches for the sheet. He lifts the edge. We do not see what he sees. But his face tells us everything: a spasm of grief so violent it seems to crack his skull from the inside. He suppresses it instantly. Decades of Soviet masculinity demand silence.

He lowers the sheet gently. Stands motionless for a long moment.

NIKOLAY

(barely audible)

He was nineteen.

The bureaucrat stamps a death certificate. We see it in CLOSE-UP:

SUPER: "Cause of death: Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome."

Nikolay stares at the stamp. Then at the shape beneath the sheet. Five bullet wounds. Gas burns. And a government that calls it a fever. He folds the paper into a small square, puts it in his coat pocket, and walks toward the door.

At the threshold, he pauses. Speaks without turning around.

NIKOLAY

(to himself)

Fever. Yes. A fever with five holes in it.

He walks out into pale winter light. The door closes behind him with a soft click that sounds like a coffin lid.

CUT TO:

Scene 4. INT. FAMILY APARTMENT, KLIMOVSK – DAY (1985)

SUPER: "One year earlier."

WARM TONES. A different world. A cramped but cheerful apartment in the Moscow suburbs. Faded wallpaper with little blue flowers, lace curtains, a crib in the corner. The smell of borscht from the kitchen. A television plays the evening news at low volume.

A BABY sleeps in the crib, fists clenched, breathing softly. Around him, a family argues – not about anything grave, but with the passionate energy only Russians can bring to the subject of baby names.

MOTHER (23, beautiful, exhausted, still in her hospital gown) holds the birth certificate.

MOTHER

His name is Innokentiy. It’s decided. I’ve already written it on the form.

GRANDMOTHER MARINA (50s, formidable, hair pinned back with military precision, the kind of woman who could command a platoon and still have dinner ready by six) slams her palm on the table.

GRANDMOTHER MARINA

Innokentiy? Are you out of your mind? The boys at school will murder him! They’ll call him Kesha, like that ridiculous cartoon parrot!

GRANDFATHER NIKOLAY sits in the corner, smoking. He has been silent since he returned from the morgue three weeks ago. He watches his daughter argue and says nothing.

Little AUNT NADIA (7), sitting on the floor with a coloring book and a mouth full of biscuit, looks up brightly.

AUNT NADIA

You should call him Kesha! Like the parrot from the cartoon! Kesha is funny!

Beat. The room erupts. Mother throws her hands up. Grandmother Marina shakes her head.

GRANDMOTHER MARINA

Fine. Three names. In a hat. Whatever God decides.

Three scraps of paper are torn from a school notebook: ILYA, ROMAN, KONSTANTIN. Mother closes her eyes. Reaches into a ceramic bowl. Pulls one out. Opens it.

MOTHER

(reading)

Konstantin.

She looks at the sleeping baby. Smiles. In the corner, Grandfather Nikolay finally speaks. His voice is hoarse from disuse.

GRANDFATHER NIKOLAY

(quiet)

Konstantin means "steadfast." He’ll need that.

Nobody asks why. But the room goes quiet for a moment. The baby sleeps on, oblivious to his new name, his dead father, and the country that is already beginning to fall apart around him.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

I was born with someone else’s name, lost my father before I could walk, and got a new dad before I could talk. That’s Russia for you. Nothing stays the same for long. Except the borscht. The borscht never changes.

CUT TO:

Scene 5. INT. FAMILY APARTMENT – DAY (1988)

KESHA (3) sits on the floor, building a tower of wooden blocks with the concentration of a nuclear physicist. Each block is placed with deliberate care. He bites his lower lip as he works.

His MOTHER stands in the doorway with a new man: STEPFATHER (28), kind-faced, quiet, wearing a freshly ironed shirt that suggests he has spent the morning preparing for this introduction. His shoes are polished. His hands are clean.

Stepfather crouches down to Kesha’s level. Extends his hand. Kesha looks at the hand. Looks at the man’s face. With the gravity of a tiny diplomat making his first international appearance, he shakes it.

KESHA

(brightly, without hesitation)

Hi, Dad.

Stepfather blinks. Looks at Mother. She nods. He turns back to Kesha, something fragile and unprepared moving across his face.

STEPFATHER

(careful)

Hello, Kesha. That’s a fine tower.

KESHA

It falls down a lot. But I keep building it.

He hands Stepfather a wooden block. Stepfather places it on the tower. It balances perfectly. Kesha nods approvingly, as if this man has passed an important test.

Mother watches from the doorway. Her eyes are wet. She turns away before anyone sees.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

He never said a word in anger or laid a finger on me. He also preferred not to interfere, but just help out financially. I can’t say it was the most successful strategy. But he gave me space to grow up by myself. Without trying to forge me in his own image. For that, I am eternally grateful.

CUT TO:

Scene 6. EXT. YEVPATORIA BEACH, CRIMEA – DAY (1988)

Blazing summer sun. A crowded Soviet beach at the height of the season: women in broad-brimmed hats reading romance novels, men in tiny swimsuits playing cards, radios competing with each other across blankets. The Black Sea sparkles like hammered tin. Ice cream vendors shout their prices. Children shriek.

Mother and AUNT IRA wade into the warm water, leaving three-year-old KESHA with a SUNBATHING WOMAN nearby.

MOTHER

(to sunbathing woman)

Watch him for two minutes? Just two minutes. Please?

The woman adjusts her hat. Smiles. Closes her eyes.

Kesha stares at her. Stares at the sea. Stares at a seagull pecking at a sandwich wrapper. Then he stands up and toddles away with the determination of a man who knows exactly where he is going.

MINUTES LATER: Mother and Aunt Ira return, dripping. The blanket is empty. The sunbathing woman is asleep.

MOTHER

(instant panic)

KESHA! KESHA!

They run. Up the beach. Down the promenade. Past the ice cream cart. Past the changing huts. Nothing. Mother’s voice rises to a pitch that turns heads across the entire beach.

AUNT IRA spots him first – a quarter-mile away, walking along TRAM TRACKS, cheerfully munching a bun he has obtained from some unknown source. He is not lost. He is not frightened. He is having the time of his life.

MOTHER

(breathless, grabbing him)

Where did you get this? Where were you?!

KESHA

(chewing happily)

I went for a bite to eat.

Mother grabs him, squeezes him to her chest, laughs and cries at the same time. The bun is crushed between them. Kesha, confused by the fuss, keeps chewing.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

Three years old. No map, no money, no language skills. And I still managed to procure a bun from thin air. Some things never change. Although my procurement methods have improved somewhat.

CUT TO:

Scene 7. EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING, KLIMOVSK – NIGHT (1988)

Red and blue lights strobe across a five-story Soviet brick building. SMOKE pours from a second-floor window – Grandmother’s apartment. FIREMEN in heavy coats rush with hoses. A crowd gathers in nightgowns and slippers. Voices overlap in the dark.

Three-year-old KESHA stands perfectly still at the edge of the crowd, face lit by the flickering glow. His mother holds his hand, but he has gone rigid – every muscle in his small body locked. His eyes are wide and unblinking, reflecting the orange flames.

A FIREMAN carries a scorched armchair through the entrance. Sparks swirl like orange snowflakes. A curtain catches fire and disintegrates in three seconds, silk to ash, beautiful and terrible.

The boy does not move. Does not blink. Does not breathe.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

Since then, every time I see a fire, I literally go numb and mentally fall back to this moment. A three-year-old boy, frozen. These are the things that shape you before you know what shape means.

CUT TO:

Scene 8. INT. KINDERGARTEN, NAP ROOM – DAY (1988)

Rows of small beds in a dark room. Children sleeping. Afternoon light filters through thin curtains. The room smells of floor polish and warm milk. A clock ticks softly. In the corner, a rocking horse with a chipped ear stands guard.

KESHA (3) lies on his side, facing the GIRL in the next bed. She has blonde pigtails and a smudge of paint on her cheek. Her eyes are open. They look at each other.

KESHA

(whispering)

Hello. What’s your name?

A shadow falls over him. The KINDERGARTEN TEACHER (50s, Soviet steel, arms like a collective farmer, a woman forged in a system that did not value whispering) stands above. Arms crossed.

KINDERGARTEN TEACHER

(ice cold)

One more word and I’ll cut your tongue off.

Kesha’s mouth snaps shut. His eyes go wide. He pulls the blanket up to his chin and lies absolutely still, like a small animal in the presence of a predator. The girl in the next bed turns away.

He does not move for the rest of nap time. Staring at the ceiling. Processing.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

It sounded so threatening and so convincing that you would believe it yourself even now. Ever since that day I use my words carefully, often choosing to keep quiet. Because who knows what might happen. Words, I learned, have consequences. Some of them involve scissors.

CUT TO:

Scene 9. INT. KINDERGARTEN – NIGHT (1989)

The kindergarten is dark. Empty. All the other children are gone. Their hooks in the cloakroom hold nothing – all the little coats and hats have been taken home. The building creaks and settles.

KESHA (4) sits alone at a small table by the window. He does not cry. He does not call out. Outside, snowflakes fall softly on oak trees and empty pathways. The streetlamps glow orange. The world is quiet and beautiful and has completely forgotten about him.

He draws something on the table with his finger. A house. A family. He erases it with his palm. Draws it again.

Hours pass. The light changes from grey to blue to black. The radiator clicks. A pipe gurgles somewhere in the walls. Finally, a RELATIVE who works at the facility returns for something she forgot and finds him.

RELATIVE

(hand to mouth)

Oh my God. How long have you been sitting here?

Kesha looks up at her with an expression that has no business being on a four-year-old’s face: calm, steady, total acceptance.

MATCH CUT TO:

Scene 10. EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING, KLIMOVSK – EVENING (1989)

KESHA stands outside his apartment door. He turns the handle. Locked. Nobody home. The hallway is silent except for the buzzing of a fluorescent light that flickers like a dying heartbeat.

He slides down to the floor, back against the door, legs stretched out. Takes off his shoes – his feet hurt. Lines the shoes up neatly, heels against the wall. Folds his hands in his lap. Waits.

The hallway is cold. The fluorescent light buzzes. He stares at the wall opposite – it has a crack that looks like a river. He traces the river with his eyes.

Two hours pass. At nine o’clock, VERA’S MOTHER from flat 48 opens her door. She is in a dressing gown, holding a cup of tea. She sees him and her face falls.

VERA’S MOTHER

(gently, kneeling)

Oh, sweetheart. Come inside. Have you eaten?

Kesha shakes his head. She takes his hand. It is ice cold. She leads him inside without another word.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

Both my mother and my stepfather were, at some point in their lives, drunks. I’m not blaming anyone. Everyone has their reasons, and those reasons have reasons of their own. But, as I often say in my anecdotes – it left its mark. Several marks, in fact. Some of them are still there.

CUT TO:

Scene 11. EXT. APARTMENT ENTRANCE, KLIMOVSK – DAY (1990)

KESHA (5) runs at full speed through a communal garden – a shortcut under someone’s windows. Flowers blur past. Grass whips at his legs. He is flying. He is invincible.

He bursts through an entrance door and SLAMS directly into an OLD LADY carrying a bag of potatoes. The bag splits. Potatoes bounce down the steps like brown grenades. One rolls under the radiator.

The old lady looks at the scattered potatoes. Looks at Kesha. Something ignites behind her eyes.

OLD LADY

(erupting)

You little PEST! Worse than the Colorado beetle! My garden! MY GARDEN! Look what you’ve done to my flowers! And now my potatoes! Do you have ANY idea how long I waited in line for these?!

Her fury is volcanic, disproportionate, terrifying. Her face is inches from his. Spittle flies. Her finger jabs at his chest like a woodpecker attacking bark. Decades of Soviet-era frustration pour out of her in a torrent of rage directed at a five-year-old boy.

Kesha opens his mouth to apologize. His lips move. No sound comes out.

He tries again. His jaw works. His tongue presses against his teeth. The words are there – he can feel them, piled up behind his teeth like cars in a traffic jam. But his mouth will not obey.

SOUND DESIGN SHIFTS: the world goes muffled, echoing, as if filtering through water. The old lady’s mouth keeps moving but her words are distorted, distant, like shouting through a wall of glass.

Kesha stands there, mouth open, paralyzed. His eyes fill with tears – not from the scolding, but from the horror of his own silence. His body has betrayed him. His words have abandoned him.

The old lady storms off, muttering about beetles and children and the decline of civilization. Kesha stands alone in the entrance. He tries to say his own name.

K-k-k-k.

He cannot.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

I started to stutter at the age of about five. It all happened very fast, like someone flipped a switch inside my head. Another new page in my life had begun. A new burden had been saddled on my soul and mind. One that would follow me everywhere, like a shadow with its own agenda.

CUT TO:

Scene 12. EXT. BUS STOP / ROAD TO SERTYAKINO – DAY (1990)

SUPER: "Summer, 1990."

KESHA (5) and his friend ROMA (7) stand at a bus stop. Roma is the undisputed leader – taller, bolder, with a permanent scab on his knee and the confidence of someone who has been seven for years. Kesha looks up at him with total trust.

ROMA

There’s a pea field past the next village. Massive. You can eat as much as you want. Nobody guards it. It’s just there.

KESHA

(eyes like saucers)

Free peas?

ROMA

Free peas. Mountains of them. Come on.

They look at each other – two boys with nothing in their pockets and everything in their imaginations. The bus shelter is covered in graffiti: someone has written "Yeltsin = Thief" and below it, in smaller letters, "But we’re all thieves, aren’t we?"

KESHA

(reading the graffiti, not understanding)

What’s that mean?

ROMA

It means grown-ups are weird. Come on, the bus is coming.

They board a rattling bus. The DRIVER glances at them – two small boys, no adults – but says nothing. This is Russia in 1990. Children roam.

They ride for twenty minutes, faces pressed to the dusty window, watching the suburbs give way to fields and birch groves.

Scene 13. EXT. PEA FIELD, SERTYAKINO VILLAGE – DAY

They get off at a village stop. Walk along a dirt road lined with dandelions. Turn a corner.

An ENORMOUS PEA FIELD stretches to the horizon. Green, endless, shimmering in the heat. The pods hang heavy, splitting open with ripeness. Bees hum. The air smells of earth and sunshine.

Kesha’s mouth falls open. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

KESHA

(whisper)

Roma. It’s so big. It goes forever.

ROMA

(grinning)

Told you. Come on!

They wade into the field. The pea plants come up to Kesha’s chest. He picks a pod, cracks it open – the peas are young, springy, explosively sweet. Juice runs down his chin.

MONTAGE: They eat with abandon. Green juice on their chins and shirts. Stuffing pods into their pockets for later. Lying on their backs between the rows, staring at the vast blue sky, bellies stretched and full. Two tiny figures in an ocean of green. The world is simple and generous and asks nothing of them.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

A rush of freedom, an impenetrable sense of excitement on the edge of a big adventure. That’s what a pea field can do when you’re five. That feeling – pure, irrational joy at something free and enormous – I’ve been chasing it ever since. And every now and then, I find it.

Scene 14. INT. FAMILY APARTMENT – EVENING

Mother stands over Kesha, arms crossed. His pockets are still bulging with pea pods. The evidence is overwhelming and, frankly, green.

A spanking follows. Then the corner. Kesha stands facing the wall, nose six inches from the wallpaper with its little blue flowers. His pockets have been emptied.

He is not sorry. He is already planning the next trip.

From her bedroom, he hears his mother talking to Stepfather in hushed tones. "He was on a bus. Alone. With a seven-year-old." Stepfather’s response is too quiet to hear. Then silence. Then the TV turns on – the evening news, Gorbachev, something about reforms.

Kesha traces the little blue flowers on the wallpaper with his finger. Each one is slightly different if you look closely. He wonders if the peas are still there, growing, waiting for him to come back.

CUT TO:

Scene 15. EXT. COURTYARD, APARTMENT BLOCK – DAY (1990)

KESHA (5) stands at the base of a large birch tree, looking up. The trunk is white and smooth, the branches spread wide. Three OLDER BOYS (8–9) stand around him, hands in pockets, radiating that particular confidence of boys who have already learned to be casually cruel.

OLDER BOY #1

Go on. Climb it. It’s easy. Even a baby could do it.

OLDER BOY #2

Getting down is the hard part. But you’ll figure it out.

KESHA

(determined, jaw set)

I can do anything if I put my mind to it.

He climbs. First branch – easy, his arms strong from playground bars. Second branch – stretching, his foot finding a knot in the bark. Third – his shoe slips, he catches himself, bark scraping his palm, keeps going. He reaches a crook about two meters up and sits, legs dangling. A wonderful view of the courtyard opens up: the playground, the garages, the khrushchyovkas stretching to the horizon.

He grins down at the boys. They are gone. Vanished. The courtyard is empty. He is alone in a tree, two meters above the ground, with no plan for coming down.

Time passes. His stomach growls. The sun moves. A dog walks by below and doesn’t look up. Should he shout? Absolutely not. He is a man, not an old lady at a market stall. He will wait. Someone will come. Probably.

His FRIENDS run by below, chasing a football.

FRIEND

(looking up, delighted)

Hey, crow! Where’s your piece of cheese?

Beat. Kesha gets the joke – the Krylov fable about the crow who opens her mouth to sing and drops the cheese. He is the crow. The tree is his foolishness. The cheese is his dignity.

KESHA

(pride cracking, voice small)

Can you… can you get my mum?

MOTHER comes running, breathless. Behind her, a BIG NEIGHBOR (30s, the kind of man who opens jars for the whole building and fixes radiators without being asked). He reaches up and plucks Kesha from the tree like a ripe apple.

Mother sets Kesha down. Brushes bark from his jacket. Pulls a leaf from his hair. Looks at him. He braces for the scolding of his life.

She hugs him instead. Hard. Long. His face, pressed into her coat, shifts from fear to surprise to something warm and unnameable.

CUT TO:

Scene 16. EXT. VARIOUS LOCATIONS – DAY (1990–1996) – MONTAGE

A rapid-fire MONTAGE of Kesha’s injuries, scored to upbeat Soviet-era children’s music that grows increasingly ironic as the injuries worsen:

– Kesha falls backward off a metal playground ladder. His back hits dirt. He lies there, wind knocked out, staring at the sky. A cloud shaped like a rabbit drifts past. He gets up. Brushes himself off. Goes home for pancakes.

– Kesha spins off a carousel at maximum speed and lands on a board of nails. FIVE puncture wounds in his backside. His SCREAM echoes across the playground and sends pigeons scattering. Mother pulls nails from his flesh at the kitchen table while he bites a wooden spoon.

– Kesha falls from a tree – a different tree, a taller one. Dislocates his left arm. Hides the injury by keeping his arm inside his jacket, Napoleon-style. He maintains this disguise for THREE DAYS so he won’t be kept from summer camp.

– At a sanatorium, Kesha tries to impress three GIRLS by jumping over a gazebo railing. His foot catches. He slams down on his left arm. AGAIN. He wakes up in a plaster cast, surrounded by the same three girls, who now feel sorry for him. Not the attention he wanted.

– A GERMAN SHEPHERD grabs his left hand. Teeth sink in. A thick yellow thread of muscle sticks out of the wound. Kesha stares at it with scientific curiosity.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

My left arm was beginning to suspect I didn’t like it. In fairness, the arm had a point. We have since reconciled.

CUT TO:

Scene 17. INT. APARTMENT BUILDING ELEVATOR – DAY (1991)

An old Soviet elevator with large wooden folding doors. The paint is chipped in patterns that look like maps of imaginary countries. The light flickers. It smells of damp concrete, old cabbage, and someone’s Soviet cologne.

KESHA (6) and his FRIEND SASHA (7) step inside. They close the outer metal door but leave the inner wooden door OPEN. Through the gap, the concrete elevator shaft is visible – dark, endless, humming with invisible machinery.

SASHA

Arms out. Brace against the walls. Like this. Flat palms.

He demonstrates: palms pressed flat against the elevator walls. Kesha copies him, small hands barely reaching.

SASHA

Now lift your feet. Both of them. Same time.

Both boys LIFT THEIR FEET off the floor. They hang there, suspended, arms braced, legs dangling. The elevator’s weight sensor reads the car as empty. It waits, confused.

SASHA

(shouting up the shaft)

KOLYA! PRESS THE BUTTON!

Somewhere above, a button is pressed. The elevator LURCHES upward. Metal bars, concrete walls, cables – all FLASH PAST inches from their dangling feet. A strobing, dizzying blur of grey and black. Wind rushes up through the shaft, whipping their hair.

The boys GRIN. Teeth showing. Eyes wild. The flickering light makes their faces appear and disappear like ghosts. This is the greatest ride in the Soviet Union and nobody knows about it except them.

The elevator stops. They drop their feet. Catch their breath. Look at each other.

KESHA

(panting, grinning)

Again?

SASHA

Again.

They lift their feet. The sensor goes blank. Someone presses another button. The elevator DROPS. This time faster. Kesha’s stomach lurches into his throat. He laughs – a wild, uncontrolled, five-alarm laugh that echoes through the shaft.

They do it five more times. When they finally stumble out into the hallway, their arms are trembling and their grins could power the building.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

When these modern lifts with automatic doors came out, parents everywhere breathed a sigh of relief. The elevator game was over. But what I’d give for one more ride in that rattling, terrifying, magnificent machine. Just one more.

CUT TO:

Scene 18. EXT. TUNNEL UNDER HIGHWAY BRIDGE – DAY (1992)

A concrete tunnel runs under a highway. A shallow stream flows through it, carrying leaves and candy wrappers from the civilized world above. KESHA (7) and THREE FRIENDS wade in, water up to their knees, cheap Soviet flashlights in hand.

FRIEND #1

There are crayfish in here. Huge ones. My brother caught one the size of his hand.

KESHA

(peering into the dark)

How do you catch them?

FRIEND #1

You just grab them. Fast. Before they pinch you.

They wade deeper. The tunnel narrows. Highway traffic rumbles above them like a never-ending thunderstorm. Their flashlight beams dance across mossy walls, picking out strange shadows and dripping pipes.

Kesha spots movement. A CRAYFISH, rust-brown and armored, backing into a crevice. He reaches in. It PINCHES his finger.

KESHA

OW!

He yanks his hand back, crayfish attached, dangling from his index finger like an angry ornament. The boys erupt in laughter. Kesha shakes his hand. The crayfish holds on. More laughter.

LATER: They sit in the tunnel, wet, cold, absolutely content, having built a small dam of stones across the stream. Tiny fish dart in the trapped pool.

Scene 19. INT. FAMILY APARTMENT – EVENING

Kesha walks in. Soaked from chest to shoes. Mud in his hair, on his neck, behind his ears.

MOTHER

Why are you wet?

KESHA

(instant, confident)

I fell in a puddle.

MOTHER

(studying the mud in his hair)

A puddle. That went over your head.

KESHA

(not blinking)

A deep puddle.

She doesn’t buy it. She doesn’t push it. She hands him a towel and points toward the bathroom. He goes, dripping.

CUT TO:

Scene 20. EXT. COURTYARD – DAY (1992)

Seven-year-old KESHA stands alone, staring at a BICYCLE leaning against a wall. It is a beauty – blue frame, chrome handlebars, a bell shaped like a ladybug. Not his. The owner is inside eating lunch, unaware.

Kesha’s breathing quickens. His fingers twitch. He looks left. Right. Behind him. Nobody.

He gets on. Pushes off. The world opens up – speed, wind, freedom. Trees blur. The courtyard expands. For fifteen seconds, his face cycles through an extraordinary emotional spectrum: euphoria, joy, lightness, then anxiety, burden, fear, horror. All compressed into the time it takes to ride from one building to another.

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