A contract killer from New York returns to the scene of his childhood to perpetrate a murder, but then it’s him who the local mafia want to see dead. He re-encounters his father, who had chased him from the parental home; his dying mother; and his younger brother, left to his own devices. Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, and Tim Roth, this crime film with its dramatic elements describes the bloody destruction of a family. The title Little Odessa refers to a quarter of Brooklyn, home to a vast number of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants with Jewish background. At the end of the 1980s, the United States experienced a large increase of immigrants fleeing from perestroika in the Soviet Union. Among these immigrants, many Russian mafiosi found their way into the U.S. In these times, New York suffered an economic recession and a significant rise in crime. Elected in 1994, the Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani makes the fight against crime the major axis of his policy. Little Odessa is the first film by James Gray, then age 25. He is of Ukrainian-Jewish descent himself, and his film is partly autobiographical.