One-Two, Soldiers Were Going...

Years later the families of eighteen soldiers gather in a field. This is where that very young platoon stopped a column of German tanks in 1944. The film moves back and forth between two times: the mothers, brothers and children standing at the grave today, and the men who fought that day. Leonid Bykov directed the film and played Sergeant Svyatkin himself; it turned out to be his last work. The telling is less interested in battle scenes than in the weight the survivors have carried for years afterwards. In place of a hymn to heroism there is loss and remembering, and there is no shortage of humour either, though behind everything laughed at somebody dies. It is counted among the most affecting films of Soviet war cinema.