TheatreHD Opera Club in GUM Cinema. The Passenger. Special screening with Lyalya Kandaurova

The opera’s plot centers on a chance encounter aboard an ocean liner fifteen years after the war. Lisa, a former concentration camp guard, comes face to face with one of her former prisoners, Marta. Lisa is traveling to South America with her husband, a German diplomat who knows nothing about his wife's past. Thrown together on the same ship, Lisa and Marta are forced to confront each other, and the horrors of the past come vividly back to life.

Mieczysław Weinberg considered The Passenger the work of his life, but the opera had a difficult stage destiny: it was never performed during his lifetime. The score — highly praised by Dmitri Shostakovich and described by Georgy Sviridov as "written with the blood of the heart" — remained banned for many years.

Finally, in 2010, the world’s first fully staged production of The Passenger premiered at the Bregenz Festival, co-produced with the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, the English National Opera in London, and the Teatro Real in Madrid. Unsurprisingly, it became a true sensation: a hymn to humanism, the raw nerve of the twentieth century — a grand, triumphant, and electrifying discovery.