The Stray White and the Speckled

The film is set in a poor provincial town. The boys of the town are drilled for fighting. At night the local crowd gathers in a pool room. Made up life stories are told there. Bands of boys meanwhile fight on empty plots. One of the clearest occupations of postwar childhood was pigeons. Pigeons were bought, sold and stolen. One day a white dove appears over the town. Ivan risks his life and catches it. From then on he becomes the target of the pigeon trade. The account is set inside a postwar childhood. The order of the town is the frame of that childhood. Vyacheslav Ilyushchenko and Liubomiras Laucevičius take the leads in Sergei Solovyov’s Soviet film of 1986.