The Matryoshka Murders

January 1991. Leningrad is starving, freezing, and ready to explode. Crime is rampant. Soldiers roam the streets. Rumors of a coup whisper through every hallway.

Documentary filmmaker Kate Hennessey arrives for an international festival - but instead of gathering footage for her NYC course, she records something she was never meant to see: an officer with a scarred face speaking with a baby-faced civilian in the hotel bar. Her guidebook warns her: No filming the military.

Then a terrified 17-...