- A boy, nicknamed Lumumba after a famous African freedom fighter, arrives in a sleepy little Estonian town. His guardian aunt has taken a position there as cultural coordinator. At school he meets Elsa and Rein, who lost his mother recently, and together they go through the first emotional blast of adolescence.
- The Culture Center of a small Estonian town is the place where the locals get together, where schoolchildren come to see popular films of the 1960s preceded by newsreels imbued with Soviet ideology, and where young people meet at disco nights and fall in love.
The young heroes of the film "Come Back, Lumumba" haven't experienced the horrors of World War II themselves. Some fifteen years have passed since the war and the words 'war hero' hardly mean a thing to them. It's the beginning of the 60s. On the political level the Soviet Union is fighting to free Africa from the hands of the imperialists and their henchmen. On the human level our young Estonian heroes are trying to get along as best they can. After school they play in the surrounding forest and even take up rafting along a river; in the evenings they gather at a local movie theater to watch Soviet movies. Their path toward a brighter tomorrow is tediously gray. One day, a new Cultural Affairs Coordinator and her orphaned nephew Lumumba, nicknamed after the famous African freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba, arrive to the sleepy Estonian town called Heaste to run a Cultural Center there. The rather unusual newcomer Lumumba quickly makes friends with Elsa and with Rein, whose mother had died recently. Rein's father cannot cope with the sudden emptiness, and because the new kid's aunt, Aurora, doesn't have anybody either, the trio of kids tries to get the two adults together. They begin to send fake love letters on behalf of Rein's father to Aurora. Unbeknownst to the kids, Aurora and Rein's father have noticed each other long before the kids cooked up their plan. But adolescence isn't easy, and the two boys realize that with this course of events that they caused themselves, their own independence and freedom is at stake. It's a story about teenagers' first encounter with the power and pain lurking in human emotion - in friendship, in first love, and in their first encounter with death.
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