The Three Rooms of Melancholia

Mischa and Kolja learn to march, salute, straighten their clothes into an orderly stack, and to fight with a gun in their hands at the children's military academy in Kronstadt. Enemy number one for them is the Chechen terrorists. Room number two: an apartment in bombed- out Grozny. Three young children are crying as they must bid farewell to their sick mother, who can no longer take care of them. They are taken in by Hadzihat, a woman who has already adopted over seventy orphans and unprovided-for children. She takes them to the third room, a refugee camp in Ingushetia. Several of those there found themselves on the street, like the young girl who at age twelve was raped several times by Russian soldiers and a few months later lost her child. The future cadets from Kronstadt are determined to wipe out the Chechen terrorists, so that the tragedy at Beslan can never again be repeated. The orphans in the camp at Ingushetia turn to Islam and hate everything Russian. The conflict in Chechnya has not only taken many human lives, but it has also stolen these young people's childhood.