Northern California Premiere
Leningrad, 1970. A group of young Jewish dissidents plots to hijack an empty plane and escape the USSR. Caught by the KGB, they were sentenced to years in the gulag and two were sentenced to death. 45 years later, filmmaker Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov reveals the compelling story of her parents, "heroes" in the West, "terrorists" in Russia.
It started as a fantasy; under the disguise of a trip to a local wedding, the hijackers would buy every ticket on a 12-seater plane, so there would be no passengers but them. While the Soviet press prints "the criminals are punished", tens of thousands of people in the free world demand "Let My People Go!" Through a collage of intimate interviews, rare archives and reenactment made both in Israel and Russia, Anat reveals the full story of her parents who cracked the Iron Curtain.
Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov was born in Israel to Sylva Zalmanson and Edward Kuznetsov, leaders of the Dymshits-Kuznetsov hijacking affair. She studied filmmaking at the London Film School. It's been a long-standing ambition for her to tell the story of her parents in the medium of film and Anat is now developing a script for a feature film based on her father's book "Prison Diaries" and her documentary "Operation Wedding".