6. Come And See (1985)
A dark as hell war film which follows the fortunes of Flyora, a young Belorussian boy during World War Two. He finds a machine gun and joins the partisans. His mother cries her eyes out, knowing she is in greater danger of being killed by the Nazis. When Flyora returns to the village, it is evident from the stack of bodies in the village that she has been killed. Flyora struggles to come to terms with this but eventually presses on, surviving an act of genocide when in a village, the Nazis push all of the inhabitants and set fire to them. Flyora climbs out of the window and escapes - the church is soon an inferno. He also gets a chance to pay back some Nazis that the partisans have captured. As they leave, Flyora spots a framed picture of Hitler. We are treated to a backwards footage sequence of Hitler's life and rise to power until he is a baby. Flyora doesn't have it in him to shoot baby Hitler. He fires at all the other frames, but not that one. A solemn message informs us that the Nazis burned 628 villages in Belarus during the war. Flyora picks up his gun and marches on with the partisans. This film, to me, is utterly perfect as a war film - nothing is sensationalised and the film doesn't rely on bloody combat scenes to make a story. It takes the viewer on a journey through the eyes of Flyora - a young boy who experiences several abominable things throughout the film but survives. You get a real sense of the panic of war and its virtually unutterable crimes. I particularly like the film because it shows acts of genocide that occur outside of a concentration camp. We must remember the heinous deeds perpetrated out in the fields by the Nazis. An important film in that it is one of the few movies out there to capture the action on the Eastern front (Russia and Belarus were close allies), it details an important part of history that we must never forget. The film did powerfully well in the USSR - drawing in nearly 30,000,000 admissions. The Nazis really stabbed the Soviet Union in the back during World War Two. They invaded Soviet Territories without warning and Come and See is a powerful testament to the ravages of Nazi genocide. It must have been very cathartic for Soviet audiences to watch this film. At last their struggles were documented and validated on the big screen for everyone to literally come and see. Lacking adventurism and elaborate set pieces, Come and See is a solemn, stark view into the abyss and definitely manages to prove the old maxim right - war is indeed hell.