Liberation - Part 1 : The Fire Bulge

In the summer of 1943 the largest tank battle of the war was fought around Kursk. The first part of the film describes that front: the preparation, the intelligence, the decisions at headquarters and what happened in the field. The telling does not turn around a single hero; soldiers, officers, commanders and the people working behind the lines come in by turns. The battle sequences are the main body of the film. This is the first film of Yuri Ozerov's five part series. It was a co-production between the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia, shot in seventy millimetre wide format. Three thousand soldiers, a hundred tanks, eighteen aircraft and thirty kilometres of dug trenches were used for the Kursk sequences. The production carries the Soviet state's account of the war; the scale is still startling today and the point of view sits on the official line of the period.