However, the dominant ideas, trump, trump, trumping for
> decades make us think that we have "true" graps of the horrors of Nazi
> occupation in the USSR because we watched Walter Cronkite's narration of "Air
> Power" or "Victory at Sea".
Great movie on the fSU, WWII and the Nazis.
Dir., Elem Klimov, "Come and See, " (1985) http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1077293,00.html Come And See has been described as "an epic of derangement". During the harrowing 142 minutes of the film, we follow teenage Florya (Alexei Kravchenko) as he is taken off by partisans fighting in the woods of Belarus in 1943. They disappear, and he is left to wander, gun in hand, until he rejoins them at the end as a hardened, active participant. Florya's ordeal turns his hair grey and puts wrinkles on his young face.
Klimov drew on his own childhood for the film. "As a young boy, I had been in hell," he explained. He and his mother and baby brother were evacuated on a raft across the Volga river during the battle of Stalingrad. "The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. The river was also burning. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it."
It was Klimov's last work and testament.
-- Michael Pugliese