For his film, Mykola Ridnyi conducted an interview with a former police officer, Dima, who at some point in his career decided to leave the police force and now works as a stonemason. Dima explains how he gradually lost his initial idealism and enthusiasm to work for justice as a policeman in the face of corruption and authoritarianism within the Ukrainian police apparatus. Filmed partly in the style of a classic worker portrait documenting daily operations at the stonemason’s workshop, including footage of the serial production of tombstones, Ridnyi disrupts the routine of Dima’s workday with a special commission: he asks him to carve a pair of police boots out of granite in the style of Soviet monuments marking the liberation of the city of Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine from National Socialist troops. In addition to the reflections and surprisingly clear statements of his protagonist, Ridnyi incorporates short sequences from the 1964 Soviet cartoon Uncle Styopa – A Militiaman, whose main protagonist is a friendly and heroic police officer, and The Adventures of Cipollino, a children’s fairy tale from 1961. The idealized world of the socialist animated films highlights the wide gap between the ideal and the real.