The life of 39-year-old Olena, a kind and responsible woman, was much the same as that of her peers: a long-established marriage, two children, a routine job… Olena sincerely believed she knew exactly what her future held—a life that was easy to predict: in due course, she would retire; she and her husband Mykola would finally buy a country cottage and plant a garden… But one day, her younger sister Rita—their mother’s favourite, a beauty with a dark past—appears on their doorstep. Ambitious, envious, hypocritical, and adept at playing the angel, Rita turns the whole family against Olena in a matter of days, seeking to take her place.

The sudden death of her son, her husband’s betrayal, the loss of her job, a serious row with her daughter and, as the icing on the cake, — her mother Zinaida Petrovna’s blind conviction that ‘little Rita’ had nothing to do with it — that it was Olena herself who had turned out to be such a worthless daughter, wife and mother — drive the despairing woman onto the bridge that night. Convinced that her life, at the age of forty, is already over and that nothing can be put right, a drunken Olena attempts to take her own life. But by a twist of fate, there is another person on the bridge — the cold-blooded, cynical Mykhailo, who has long since lost faith in humanity. He has come here to honour the memory of his sister, who, exactly two years ago, on a night just like this, threw herself off this very bridge.

Having failed to stop his sister at the time, Mykhailo sets about ‘making amends’ — he pulls Olena away from the railings. He is furious with himself, as he has no desire to interfere in anyone’s life, let alone take responsibility for this erratic, drunken woman, who manages to label him a ‘maniac’. But he cannot abandon Olena either, because he realises that the moment he drives off, she will go through with what she has started. With his back against the wall, an exasperated Mykhailo shoves the indignant Olena into the car and drives her towards a new life, to prove to the despondent woman that ‘she’ll always make it off the bridge’…

A film from the film series Chosen by Time.

A story about the outstanding Ukrainian artist Ambrosiy Buchma (1891-1957), a coryphaeus of Ukrainian theatre and cinema.