Hydraulic engineer Vadim Rudenko had two dreams, to be with his beautiful Vera and to buy a Volga car (its role in serving the Soviet nomenklatura made the car a contemporary cultural icon). Unfortunately, they were two antagonistic dreams as Vera remained in the Soviet Union while Vadim was sent to build a dam with a team of Soviet engineers: The Aswan High Dam. It was the 1960s, the USSR and the rest of the world were in the grips of a wave of euphoria, thousands of dams were being built all over the world, from the USA to Europe, from Russia to China.  Developing countries were inundated with offers to finance and build dams, which were not only an instrument of progress, but above all of control, valuable pawns in the eternal chess game of the Cold War. It was in this climate that the Aswan High Dam was born, first offered to Egypt  by the British, then by the French and finally by the Americans. But Nasser was convinced that the best offer was the Russian one, and so the construction of the Great Dam began. Ninety thousand Egyptian fellahin (peasants) and Sudanese Nubian nomads had to be relocated.  Fifty thousand Egyptians were transported to the Kawm Umbū valley, 50 km north of Aswan, and most of the Sudanese were resettled back in Sudan. Villages and archeological finds disappeared under the waters. With great intelligence Markov uses as the thread of his documentary the images that Rudenko, an avid  amateur filmmaker, shot, and his correspondence with Vera. The result is an highly original  work, which without voice-over (other than the one reading the epistolary), through the skilful editing of exceptional archival material largely never seen before, tells the story of the birth of the dam, one of the largest earthen embankment dams in the world,  that sprang from the “brief love affair” between Gamal Abdel Nasser and Krushchev. Teresa Cavina