The Madonnas Of Leningrad

In the autumn of 1941, Marina, a guide at Leningrad's Hermitage Museum, takes down the museum's masterpieces for safekeeping. As she does so, she commits the exquisite visions of angels and madonnas to memory, brush stroke by brush stroke. While bombs fall on the city, she builds a Hermitage in her mind - a place to escape to amidst the horror.

In modern day America, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on everyday life. She cannot hold on to fresh memories - her adult children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild - but her distant past in Leningrad returns in vivid snapshots, rising unbidden to the surface of her mind...