Analysing the power struggles taking place within the dancer's home company, the Kirov Ballet, and within the Russian ruling elite, it suggests that the dancer may not have been sole author of his destiny, but instead was a pawn on a complicated political chessboard.
In the centre of Belfast this Sunday there will be two parallel political struggles taking place on the street.
There are unresolvable struggles taking place within this quiet, gentle music: between recollection and the past, between individual visions of earlier days, and between a parent and child who are both inextricably connected and unconquerably separate.
There are many such struggles taking place in the world today: in Algeria, in China, in Iran, in Turkey, in Egypt, in Nigeria, writers are being censored, harassed, jailed, and even murdered.
It is hard for me, at 25, to imagine the daily struggles taking place so far away, but I do share the soldiers' idealism and their hopes for a country bearing the tremendous legacy of abominable leadership.
As the director, Julia Bacha (a writer and editor of "Control Room" about the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera), put it, "I hope this film can have the same effect on its viewers as the village's efforts had on those who experienced it — inspiring more people to believe in, cover, support and join the unarmed struggles taking place in the West Bank and East Jerusalem today".
His struggles took place mostly in the solitude of the studio he began renting in 1997, a nook inside a sculptor friend's Harlem loft.
Helm shows that, in Ravensbrück, where the term "Blockova" was used, rather than Kapo, power struggles took place among prisoner factions over who would occupy the Blockova position in each barrack.
Power struggles take place between local actors such as citizen movements and multi-national companies, instead of within institutions of the nation state [ibid].
Similarly, there seems to be a lack of expertise about the larger social and political contexts in which these struggles take place.
Their struggles take place on many different levels, from the individuals working for justice for rape survivors in their own communities to the handful who walk the halls of power.
