The Assault as a Mirror Of Ukrainian Reality

The film was made in a strictly documentary manner. The screen accurately reproduces a submachine-wielding commando assault on a company office peopled by defenseless women and the brutal destruction of equipment and premises ostensibly in search of arms and drugs. Mrs. Zorina. a real-life company director's wife and economist, has gone through searches with an attempt to plant live ammunition, third-degree interrogations, and even pre-trial custody.

Each of the novel and film characters have real-life prototypes. Actress Anastasia Serdiuk, who played the heroine, even looks like her prototype, Mrs. Zorina herself. One of the lawyers, who supported the firm in confronting with police mayhem, had as a prototype Dmytro Dakhno, commercial manager of the STB TV channel, who was assaulted and beaten in his apartment in early March, as The Day's readers will recall. Involvement in the Mezacred affair, as the former STB director Mykola Kniazhytsky admits, may be one more version of that strange attack.

The documentary record of events sometimes contradicts the laws of art. But, as the plot unravels, you understand that Mrs. Zorina's book and its screen version made by STB under present conditions is a serious act of civic courage by film director Lidia Kazberova who performs a detailed autopsy on our rotten society, in which the state has become the main racketeer.