The Jump

In the Cold War years of the 1970s, an American patrol boat meets a Soviet ship off the East coast of the United States for talks about fishing rights in the Atlantic. In the midst of this, while Soviet commanders are aboard the US Coast Guard vessel where the talks are being held, a Lithuanian sailor jumps across the ten feet of icy water separating the boats. Crash-landing on the deck of the American ship, he desperately begs for asylum.

Though they try, the Americans ultimately fail to provide protection and the Soviets are allowed to capture him and return him to their vessel. But this was only the beginning of the story.

Through rare archival footage and a dramatic first-person re-enactment of that fateful day by Simas Kudirka, the would-be defector himself, this tale of one of the biggest Cold War muddles takes us on a stranger-than-fiction journey of imprisonment, uncanny twists of fate, and the emotional sacrifices of becoming a universal symbol of freedom.