Moscow, 1938. Stalin has been in power for sixteen years and his purges are underway. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is lying unpublished in a desk drawer, and his latest play Molière has been banned following terrible reviews in Pravda. As a secret policeman dryly puts it, this has opened up a convenient "gap in his schedule." This "gap" is to be filled by writing a play about Stalin's life.
As Bulgakov loses himself in a world of secrets, threats, and paradoxes, he begins to fall ill from kidney disease. His feverish dreams of conversations with Stalin become reality in his mind, just as the state's lies become truths in his play. Collaborators is a darkly comic portrait of the impossible choices facing an artist living under dictatorship, and a surreal journey into the imagination of a writer as he loses himself in the subject of his drama.
