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A magical portrait of Russia's revolutionary artistic avant-garde - Mayakovsky, Voloshin, Blok, Malevich, Tatlin - through the life of Sonia Dymshitz-Tolstaya, an impassioned artist whose life reflected the social upheavals of her time.

Known familiarly as Sonia, Sofia Dymshitz-Tolstaya (1886 - 1963) was born into a wealthy Jewish merchant family in St. Petersburg. Inspired early on by the promise of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, she risked everything to make a better life for herself and others.

In 1907, she eloped with the young writer Alexei Nicolaevich Tolstoy (a distant relative of Leo) and was subsequently disowned by her family. Together, she and Tolstoy began a Bohemian, artistically adventurous life among what later became known as the Russian Avant-Garde.

By 1915 she had left Tolstoy and two years later met and became intimate with the Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (architect of the famous Monument to the Third International). With Tatlin at her side, she became part of the Revolution's inner circle of writers, artists and composers - one of the few Jewish women in this collective - who believed they could transform the entire world into their dream of Utopia.

However, unlike many of her contemporaries, Sonia refused to leave the Soviet Union. The remainder of her life was spent in Leningrad where she endured the brutal Purges of the thirties, the Siege of 1942, and the death of Stalin in 1953.

Sonia's story is brought to life through interviews, journal entries, memoirs, letters, family photographs, works of art, and rare archival footage, as well as innovative and beautiful animated sequences - a kind of photomontage - inspired by Sonia's artwork and by the style that characterized much of the art of the Russian Avant-garde. A story about passion, art and idealism, Sonia is a tribute to an extraordinary artist and a unique moment in history.