A former World War II pilot, Nadezhda Petrovna, has difficulty adjusting to the monotony of her postwar life as director of a provincial secondary school. Petrovna's sense of alienation is projected onto her surroundings and reflected in her austere, blunted style, disconnected from the present, retreating into the past. The distance between the generations is bitterly, selfishly felt by both Petrovna and her students, including her adopted daughter. Each views the other through the concerns of their times, blind to reasons behind the others' actions. While Shepitko may lament the apolitical younger generation, she sees their options as more conscribed than those of their mothers, whose worlds ironically opened up when the world went to war. Larissa Shepitko, who met an untimely death in 1979, based her film, controversial in the USSR, on the story of an actual member of a woman's fighter squadron. -Kathy Geritz