On 11 September 1979, a fifteen-year-old Lisbon boy boarded a flight bound for Moscow, carrying a scholarship, a head full of socialist idealism, and the full blessing of his militant communist parents. His destination was Astrakhan – a port city at the mouth of the Volga, on the edge of the Caspian Sea – where he would study fishing techniques for a year. Forty-four years later, that boy, now a middle-aged man named Martim Santa Rita, sat down in a crumbling Lisbon apartment and told his son Mateus the story he had kept hidden from his family for decades. Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Mourão’s camera was rolling.
The result is Astrakan 79, a 64-minute hybrid documentary that premiered at Visions du Réel in Switzerland in March 2023 before sweeping through the festival circuit. It won Best Director in a Portuguese Feature Film at IndieLisboa in 2023, took the Jean-Loup Passek Award for Best Portuguese Documentary at MDOC in Melgaço, and received an Honourable Mention at FID:RIO in Brazil in 2025. The film reached UK cinemas via ICA Films on 20 September 2024. It is, at its core, a story about how political belief passes – or fails to pass – from one generation to the next.
The Context Portugal Cannot Forget
To understand why a Portuguese family would send their teenage son to the Soviet Union in 1979, you have to understand what Portugal had just lived through. The Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 – so named because protesters placed red carnations in the muzzles of soldiers’ rifles – overthrew the authoritarian Estado Novo regime that had ruled Portugal for nearly half a century under António de Oliveira Salazar and his successor Marcelo Caetano. The revolution was almost bloodless, but its political aftershocks were seismic.
The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), which had spent decades in clandestinity, emerged as the most organised political force in the post-revolutionary landscape. Western intelligence estimates suggested the Soviet Union funneled between $40 million and $50 million to Portuguese communist organisations in the year following the revolution, according to a 1975 Time report. For the children of committed communists like Martim Santa Rita, the Soviet Union was not an abstract enemy state but a living utopia, a society that “fulfilled all their ideals.”
This was the precise historical moment Martim stepped into. His father was subscribed to Soviet Life, the Soviet counterpart to the American Life magazine. Leafing through its glossy pages of workers’ heroism and collective prosperity, the teenager made a decision that would alter the trajectory of his life.
From Lisbon to the Caspian: A Teenager’s Communist Pilgrimage
The journey itself was an odyssey. From Lisbon, Martim flew to Moscow, then took a train across the Russian heartland to Astrakhan – a three-day journey by rail from the capital. Astrakhan sits 100 kilometres from the Caspian Sea, at the upper edge of the Volga Delta, at an elevation of 28 metres below sea level, making it the lowest city in Russia. Founded on the site of a medieval Tatar khanate conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1556, it was in 1979 a Soviet industrial city of roughly half a million people, known for its fishing fleet, caviar production, and ship repair yards. For a fifteen-year-old from Lisbon, it must have felt like the edge of the world.
What happened next remains partially veiled. The official line – repeated in every synopsis – is that Martim “fell in love several times, dropped out of school, slept on park benches and sold all his records and blue jeans.” The communist ideal instilled by his parents was “lost along the way.” But Mourão’s film makes clear that the experience was more complicated and more painful than a simple loss of faith. Martim returned to Portugal after roughly a year and a half, carrying a sense of failure and shame that would remain a family taboo for decades.
Mourão’s Archaeology of Memory
Catarina Mourão, born in Lisbon, studied music, law, and film at Bristol and Edinburgh universities before founding AporDoc, the Portuguese Documentary Association, in 1998. She teaches cinema and documentary at Lisbon’s Fine Art School and co-founded the independent production company Laranja Azul with Catarina Alves Costa in 2000. Her body of work – spanning more than three decades – consistently circles the themes of memory, dream, archives, and autobiography. Her 2015 feature A Toca do Lobo (The Wolf’s Lair), an investigation of family secrets during the Salazar dictatorship, premiered at Rotterdam and was released theatrically across Portugal.
Astrakan 79 sits squarely within this project. Mourão constructs the film from three interlocking registers: present-day confessional footage of Martim speaking to his son Mateus (who appears on screen as an oboe player); archival material including postcards and photographs taken on Martim’s clandestine camera during his time in the Soviet Union; and poetic re-enactments featuring a young actor playing Martim’s “ghostly twin.” The cinematography by Paulo Menezes uses a deliberately muted palette, and the sound design by Armanda Carvalho and Hugo Leitão underpins the whole with the melancholy sound of the oboe.
The Guardian’s Phuong Le, reviewing the film in September 2024, noted that “the melancholy sound of an oboe thrums through the opening frames” as the camera moves through “a slightly rundown house whose pale blue corridors are smudged with streaks of white paint.” Le identified the intergenerational conversation between Martim and Mateus as “the emotional beating heart of the film,” while observing that “the re-enactments of Martim’s time in Astrakhan feel quite distracting and even unnecessary.”
It is a fair criticism, and one shared by Gazettely’s Arash Nahandian, who nevertheless praised Mourão for transforming “a personal story into a universal exploration of teenage hope, disillusionment, and intergenerational reconciliation.” The tension between documentary authenticity and dramatised reconstruction is a deliberate formal choice – Mourão is, after all, working in the territory of memory itself, where the line between what happened and how it is remembered is never clean.
The Father-Son Conversation at the Film’s Core
What elevates Astrakan 79 beyond a mere Cold War curiosity is the specificity and tenderness of the father-son dynamic. Mateus M Santa Rita, a young musician, appears both as himself and as the narrator (voice) of his father’s story. The IndieLisboa programme described the film as “a hybrid coming of age” in which “past taboos resonate in the present and an intergenerational chain of understatements and omissions is finally brought gently to the front in a frank conversation between father and son.”
This is familiar territory for Portuguese documentary. The country’s post-revolutionary cinema has long been preoccupied with the question of what was left unspoken during the decades of dictatorship and its aftermath. What Mourão adds is a generational dimension: it is not just that Martim kept his experience secret from his parents, but that the silence shaped his relationship with his own son. When Mateus plays his oboe at the film’s opening, we understand that the music is itself a form of inheritance – a response to a story he is only now hearing in full.
The production credits reveal an interesting detail: the line producer is Anastassia Kortsinskaja, a Russian name, and the film was partially produced by Terratreme Filmes, one of Portugal’s most artistically ambitious production houses (known for its work with Pedro Pinho and Susana Nobre). This suggests a collaborative, cross-border production – appropriate for a film about the entanglement of Portuguese and Soviet histories.
A Film That Travels
Astrakan 79 has proven remarkably itinerant. Its festival trajectory – from Visions du Réel in Nyon (March 2023) through IndieLisboa (April 2023), MDOC Melgaço (August 2023), FIDBA Buenos Aires, MIDBO Bogotá, Macao International Documentary Film Festival, DocPoint Helsinki, Ethnocineca Vienna, and FID:RIO (2025) – maps a genuinely global circulation. The UK theatrical release via ICA Films in September 2024 placed it alongside far higher-profile titles.
For British audiences, the film offers an unusual perspective on Cold War history: not the familiar Anglo-American lens of espionage and nuclear standoff, but the quieter story of how communist ideology reverberated through Western European families, shaping childhoods and relationships in ways still being untangled. Portugal’s proximity to the revolutionary moment – only five years separated the Carnation Revolution from Martim’s departure – gives the film an urgency that a more distant setting would lack.
Why It Matters Now
The timing of Astrakan 79‘s release is not incidental. In an era when nostalgia for both Soviet and authoritarian aesthetics has proliferated across social media – when “Sovietwave” and “Eastern Bloc chic” have become visual currencies for young Westerners who never lived under these regimes – Mourão’s film offers a corrective. It does not romanticise the Soviet experience or the communist ideal; nor does it demonise either. Instead, it shows what it actually felt like to be a fifteen-year-old boy who believed, who travelled, who lost that belief, and who spent forty years unable to talk about it.
The film’s title – Astrakan 79, with the slightly off-kilter spelling – captures this duality. The misspelling (the standard English transliteration is “Astrakhan”) may be an artifact of Portuguese phonetics or a deliberate gesture of estrangement, reminding the viewer that this is not a Russian story but a Portuguese one about Russia, filtered through memory and distance. The number 79 does double duty: it marks the year of Martim’s journey, but also a moment in time that, for those who lived it, can never be fully recovered or fully explained.
Mourão’s achievement is to make that impossibility – the impossibility of fully knowing another person’s past, even a parent’s, even a child’s – into something luminous and precise. The film’s 64 minutes feel both intimate and expansive, a small window onto a story that, as the Visions du Réel programmers noted, captures “the moment in which a middle-aged man decides to relate a formative experience from his youth, and in doing so, finally let go of his burden.”
That burden was never only Martim’s. It belonged to the generation of Portuguese communists who looked eastward for salvation, and to a historical moment when a fifteen-year-old boy genuinely believed that fishing techniques in a Caspian port city might be the first step toward building a better world. Mourão’s camera does not mock that belief. It honours it, and then gently sets it down.
Astrakan 79 (2023), directed by Catarina Mourão, is available in the UK via ICA Films. Runtime: 64 minutes. For screening information, visit ICA Films. For more on Portuguese documentary cinema, see our coverage of Portuguese contemporary film.
