Synopses & Reviews
Set in tumultous contemporary Ukraine, this intircate story of love, sex, friendship, and death is centered around three women, two of whom - Daryna, a TV director, and Vlada, a painter - live in our time, and the third of whom, Olena, died in World War II in the ranks of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. One day Daryna is struck by a picture of Olena she found in an archive, and she starts a documentary based on Olena's story. That's how she meets Olena's grandson and falls in love with him. Soon, however, Daryna discovers that their love is overshadowed by the dark secrets of the silenced past, and that the dead may find their posthumous ways of continuing their disrupted missions... Daryna now faces two mysteries, two women's deaths separated in time by sixty years, both of which have so dramatically interfered with her life. Does the past ever pass? Should one dig up the abandoned secrets of history, or would it be better, for the sake of safety, to never touch them? And how do we come to terms with the traumas of the past which we don't know we'd inherited, once they are so unexpectedly revealed? While men act as the agents of history, women stay its invisible keepers - that's what Daryna understands. Now it's her turn to break that silence...
Synopsis
Spanning sixty tumultuous years of Ukrainian history, this multigenerational saga weaves a dramatic and intricate web of love, sex, friendship, and death. At its center: three women linked by the abandoned secrets of the past--secrets that refuse to remain hidden.
While researching a story, journalist Daryna unearths a worn photograph of Olena Dovgan, a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed in 1947 by Stalin's secret police. Intrigued, Daryna sets out to make a documentary about the extraordinary woman--and unwittingly opens a door to the past that will change the course of the future. For even as she delves into the secrets of Olena's life, Daryna grapples with the suspicious death of a painter who just may be the latest victim of a corrupt political power play.
From the dim days of World War II to the eve of Orange Revolution, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is an "epic of enlightening force" that explores the enduring power of the dead over the living.