"It said in the papers this morning that a new era has begun", reads to motto - from Bertolt Brecht – to Nicola Bellucci’s documentary, a lucid and sensitive examination of a Chechnya caught between a war-torn past and a present defined by political repression, the failure to come to terms with the recent past, and by president Kadyrov’s clinging onto Russian power. The film revolves particularly around four women who have been fighting for human rights under worsening conditions for many years. In the present of the film, they get increasingly disillusioned with the situation in Putin’s Russia. The building where they work is also home to a Blues Club that is frequented by a group of young people. Having only vague memories of the Chechen wars in the 90s, they try to make sense of the strange things that are happening in their country. By linking the private and personal to the political, and by mixing footage from today’s Chechnya with an exceptionally rich archive material, Nicola Bellucci shows with sensitivity and compassion what it means to live in a divided society that navigates a no-man’s land between war and peace, repression and freedom, archaic traditions and modern life.