The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

This award-winning, achingly beautiful documentary reveals how the Chechen War has affected children in both Russia and in Chechnya. Russian children are filmed at Kronstadt near St. Petersburg, where they are being trained as child soldiers.

The imagined enemy is the Chechen, the foe whose utter defeat turns a soldier into a hero of the fatherland. Chechen children are filmed in Ingushetia, in a family which consists of 75 orphans who have been salvaged from the ruins of a devastated Grozny. All of their parents were killed by the Russian ‘soldiers’ – possibly the very children in uniform being trained at Kronstadt.