Onder Moskou

The Moscow subway is an enormous complex of richly decorated arcades, subterranean palaces with mural paintings representing the Communist ideal. They are a feat of Stalin, who had the subway built in the 1930s as a showpiece of his empire. Director Leo de Boer roamed this Moscow underworld for a few weeks and met one of the workers who helped construct the subway at the time. It was the era of duty, comradeship and a solid belief in the strength of the collective. Nowadays, many Russians are penniless, the subway is facing attacks and the materials need replacing. Still, there are people who believe in an ideal: the ‘diggers’, a group of men who, at the risk of their lives, descend into the network of corridors below the subway and disclose a world that nobody knows about.