7. Come And See (1985)
In Belarus - 1943, a young boy named Flyora is taken by the Partisans to fight with them. They go to confront the Nazis and Flyora is given a very low rank. He is left behind by the Partisans and is bitterly disappointed but things get slightly better when he meets Glasha - a beautiful girl who has been left behind too. They come under attack by German planes and the noise leaves Flyora temporarily deafened. He and Glasha run back to his village and find his family gone. They sit down to dinner but Glasha is sick afterwards. Flyora believes his family are hiding in a bog but when he and Glasha go outside they see a pile of bodies behind Flyora's house. He gets hysterical and wades through the bog until the pair run into Roubej - a resistance fighter. They are taken to a group of villagers who fled from the attack and he sees his friend Yustin who has been dowsed with petrol and set alight. Flyora accepts his family is dead. In the quest to stay alive and get food, Flyora encounters some of the worst excesses of Nazism. Roubej is killed by a land mine. Flyora is locked into a hut of fellow Belorussians, he climbs out the window but the Nazis torch the hut, laughing their heads off as the people within burn to death. Flyora has more brushes with the hateful Nazis and at the end of the film, he shoots it - using his rifle for the first time. A series of pictures rewinds showing the death camps and the rise of Hitler from a young man back to a picture of Adolf as a baby. Flyora shoots them all except the picture of the baby - he cannot bring himself to shoot it. Finally we see Flyora marching into a forest with the partisans. In all honesty, Come and See must be the most realistic representations of war ever portrayed on the screen. When it was screened, members of the audience collapsed at the horror before them, horror which is particularly hard to swallow as it is seen through the eyes of a child. Director Klimov does a fantastic job in evoking the sights, smell, sounds and sensations of war and the movie is important because it is a portrayal of The Second World War on the Eastern front and it acknowledges the terrible things that were done to countries we rarely think of as suffering at the hands of the Nazis - in this case Belarus. Nazi atrocities were not just confined to the concentration camps, villages were wiped out and people mass executed in the most depraved and sadistic ways possible. Apparently at a screening, an old German Soldier who had been through Poland and Belarus jumped up and said "Everything in this movie is the truth. I will testify and the worst thing is, my children and grandchildren will come to see this film". The film is breathtaking in its scope and vision. It captures the chaos and societal collapse that comes from war - the breeding grounds for genocide and other casual war atrocities. It is a film to revere and greatly admire but due to its disturbing content, I don't think you can love Come and See.