- Two Soviet sailors, Peter and Sergei, go ashore in Liverpool to spend one night on the town. Peter can speak a minimal amount of English but it's enough to make contact with two Liverpudlian natives, Elaine and Theresa. Elaine and Peter immediately fall in love with each other, but the night is short and they must leave with the ship. Elaine can't forget him and writes a letter to Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, asking him to make it possible for them to reunite.- Written by Mattias Thuresson
The circumstances surrounding Letter to Brezhnev's production, and the resourcefulness demanded of its makers, speak as much of the time and place from which it was sprung (a 1980s Liverpool blighted by unemployment and industrial decline) as the characterisation of the city represented in the film itself. The film was made on a shoestring budget in less than three weeks, calling on the unpaid services of family and friends; the filmmakers borrowed equipment for the shoot, with cast and crew agreeing to work on the promise of deferred pay. It had its world premiere in October 1985 in the distinctly un-showbiz environs of Knowsley council's offices.
The film's unexpected success, coupled with its unembellished and unflinching portrayal of a post-industrial city on the margins of Thatcher's Britain, has meant that Letter to Brezhnev has done more than perhaps any other film before or since in putting Liverpool on the cinematic map. On its home turf, part of this success can be attributed to its articulation - in the form of a cinematic postcard to the nation - of a self-consciously critical local voice ("Just look at this city," says a taxi-driver at one point, "whoever did the planning for all this wants his balls roasted").
Set against the backdrop of Thatcherism, new romanticism, and a Europe still in the grip of the Cold War, the film is politically and culturally very much of its time. Its sympathetic portrayal of the Russians offered the prospect of a thaw in East-West relations, an approach that was little evident in the British media in 1985. As Elaine asks, can Russia really be any worse than Liverpool?
For the film's Moscow sequences, the budget constraints demanded a certain resourcefulness when it came to location shooting, with the skyline of Birkenhead providing an admirable stand in for the Russian capital. This was to be the first of many occasions on which Liverpool was to serve as a double for other cities. Indeed, the success of Letter to Brezhnev was instrumental in the development of initiatives which sought to promote Liverpool as a leading centre of film production, exploiting the city's locations and architectural heritage. Liverpool is now the second most filmed city in the UK, after London.
