PIT No. 8
In the heart of a once thriving Ukrainian coal-mining region everybody digs – retirees, unemployed miners and even the children. Years ago, the town's desperate residents decided to start mining illegally; they excavate everywhere: in abandoned mines, under the basements of demolished buildings, in the neighborhood woods and leisure parks, as well as in their own vegetable gardens.
The story focuses on the Sikanov family, which has three children. 15-year-old Yura, the grandson of a powerful Soviet plant director, is the head of the family working as a miner in the illegal pit. Most Jura wants to run his own cafe somewhere far from home, but the responsibility for the two sisters and looming economic crisis pushes his dreams in the distant future.
Film was shot for two and a half years in the Donetsk region where the lately elected President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych spend his troubled childhood and where he strarted his political career.