[1] Watson has described the film as "the most stretching thing I’ve done as a mature actress.

"[2] During Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, literature professor Yevgenia Ginzburg is falsely convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to 10 years hard labor in a Soviet forced labour camp.

Having lost everything, and no longer wishing to live, she meets Dr. Anton Walter, a Crimea German political prisoner who is a doctor in a Kolyma gulag labor camp.

They fall in love and, slowly, Yevgenia begins to come back to life.

According to Watson, "It was delivered pretty much the day the market crashed so nobody was buying anything.