Nobody to See Us

2026 · Feature fiction film · in development

Saint Petersburg, December 1999. The Soviet Union is gone, and Russia is coming apart at the seams. Twenty-year-old Olya is raising her baby daughter alone. The girl’s father, a former student from Guinea-Bissau, has vanished without a word. Shamed by strangers and by her own family for having a child with a Black man, Olya wants only to take her daughter home to Kazakhstan. But she cannot cross the new border with her daughter without the father’s consent, so she needs the court to strip him of his parental rights. To do that, she must prove that he abandoned them. Searching for witnesses within his émigré community, she meets the people he left behind and learns that money has gone missing and that he is suspected of taking it. The deeper she digs, the less sure she becomes of who abandoned whom. What she comes to understand is harder still: love can be real and still not be enough.