Byelorussian Station

Four former soldiers come together twenty-five years after the war. The last time they saw each other was at the Byelorussian station in the summer of 1945. Now they have gathered for a friend's funeral. Afterwards they do not go their separate ways but spend a day walking the city together, discovering how far their lives have drifted from one another. Andrei Smirnov's film has no interest in heroic narrative; what it is about is how badly the men who came back from that war fit into civilian life. Alfred Schnittke wrote the score. The song in it is Bulat Okudzhava's, sung on screen by Nina Urgant as a former front-line nurse, and it went on to become one of the best known war songs in the Soviet Union.