The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Belarus

The Role is about a brilliant actor in revolutionary Russia who takes on the greatest role of his life - the role of another man. Influenced by the ideas of symbolism and the Silver Age, he decides to slip into the life of his doppelganger – a revolutionary leader in the new Soviet Russia. First intrigued, then obsessed, he flings himself into the role and lives it to the hilt… even when the play of the life he is writing heads towards a tragic finale. Based on true incidents in the lives of Russia’s symbolists, this gripping film explores how far one man will go for the role of a lifetime.

The movie is set in Belarus, where a team of counter-intelligence officers is given only three days to find a German radio operator posing as a Soviet soldier, behind soviet lines, on the eve of a major offensive.

Year 1917. Young doctor Valentin Voyno-Yasenetskyj with his wife and four children moved to Tashkent, beset by civil war and intervention. Voyno-Yasenetskyj became head physician in the city hospital. He not only saves hundreds of patients every day, operating under the bullets of the permanent street battles, fighting for his life and life of his beloved wife, dying of TB. In the midst of persecution, he as alone with four children on the outskirts of the former empire, so he decides to become a priest. And since then, he never altered neither scalpel, nor cross, he goes with them through all their hard exiles and arduous life, treating both: body and soul.