It’s 1979, and Soviet Central Committee Secretary KAPTINOV commits an idiotic blunder. While recruiting East German communist groups to visit the communist utopia that is the USSR, he accidentally invites a group of gay communists to the Soviet Union, where homosexuality is illegal and culturally unacceptable.
ROBBIE, STEF, ARLENE, and the pug known as VLADIMIR arrive in Moscow. When the truth is uncovered, their translator LARISSA is given the impossible mission of ensuring that a) no one finds out they are gay and b) they don’t find out that no one knows they are gay. Larissa is promised promotion in success, disgrace and firing in failure.
The truth of course soon comes to light and shatters the group’s illusions about the USSR. But by then, Robbie has already met MAXIM, his love interest and a closeted gay man, though he doesn’t yet know that Maxim, like so many gay men at the time, is being blackmailed by the KGB to act as an informant on homosexuals.
As the KGB smells something fishy and deploys operative YURI to spy on our group, Robbi, Stef, and Arlene continue their series of Moscow misadventures, along the way revealing to Larissa just how many people, some closer to her than she ever imagined, have to live a lie for fear of state violence and thuggery due to their sexuality. While Robbie and Maxim find love, Larissa and Yuri’s hearts begin to change, as another misunderstanding sees Yuri and Stef (who thinks Yuri is hitting on him) becoming friends.
As Robbie prepares for his climactic address to a crowd of USSR communists, Larissa and her superiors scramble to make sure he doesn’t make any mention of being gay.
Société
Non-Stop Production is one of the leading film and television production companies in Russia. The company’s projects include, to name a few, Leviathan (Best Script at Cannes Film Festival, Golden Globe winner), and Loveless (Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy award nomination) by internationally acclaimed director Andrey Zvyagintsev, as well as Beanpole (Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard program in 2019) by Kantemir Balagov. Non-Stop Production is also the company behind some of the highest-grossing Russian films of the last decade, as well as a bunch of hi-end serialized period dramas, internationally released by Amazon Prime. The shows in development include Frozen land (true crime mini-series presented in Series mania Co-pro pitching session in 2020 and co-produced by Topic) and Headshot (YA show, Endeavor content handle international sales).