A 12 year old autistic boy must solve the murder of the neighbor’s cat, crack the Nazi military code AND travel from Moscow to Leningrad when his father disappears in one of Stalin’s purges.

SYNOPSIS:

http://www.magicalrealism.us/2013/10/02/lev-a-moscow-murder-mystery/ The film is a Moscow murder mystery of sorts. The 1941 story surrounds a 12 year old autistic savant. Lev Vetrov is mathematically gifted and socially clueless. He has been raised in a high ranking communist party member’s home. His father can barely cope with his son’s ability and disability. Lev is an advanced cryptographer. However, Lev takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers. However he has help. Helenka, a 12 year old girl and Lev’s only friend, whispers helpful hints on how to deal with people that he encounters. Helenka and Lev each night tune into a mysterious and encoded radio signal. On the verge of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Lev struggles with finding who killed a neighbor’s cat, finding his mother, and also with breaking the code. Early one morning, Lev and Helenka come across his neighbor’s cat, impaled on a kitchen knife. The cat’s owner finds Lev cradling her dead cat in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending the morning in jail, Lev resolves – against the objection of his NKVD father – to discover just who has murdered the cat. He is encouraged by Helenka, to write a book about his investigations, hoping that this will bring Lev out of his world of cryptography. While trying to break the code, Lev’s father is arrested in one of the Stalinist purges. Lev must then travel, by himself, from Moscow to Leningrad to find his mother.

LEV, A MOSCOW MURDER MYSTERY