The Lark

Russian prisoners of war seize a tank and lead the Germans on a long chase across country. The prisoners are driving their own tanks, which the Germans have been using as targets to test a new anti tank weapon. Knowing that death is near, the men let go of all restraint, tear down German monuments and head toward a field where women are being held at forced labour. The film does not build the war as a display of heroism; it tells the last hours of people who have nothing left to lose. The account comes from the vein of Soviet cinema of 1964 that took the war on an individual scale. The inside of the tank is almost its only setting. Vyacheslav Gurenkov appears in the ninety one minute Soviet film by Nikita Kurikhin and Leonid Menaker, completed in 1964.