Tomorrow Was the War

A small Soviet town in 1940. Final year students go to their Komsomol meetings, try to say the right thing and plan the lives ahead of them. Everything changes when the father of one of the girls in the class is declared an enemy of the people and arrested. Her friends are forced to take sides. School becomes a harder place than home. Yuriy Kara directed the film from Boris Vasilyev's novel; it was his graduation work. It came out in 1987, during glasnost, and was among the first films to take the repressions of the Stalin years directly as its subject. The sentence in the title says everything: the audience knows these young people will go to war a year later, and they do not. The telling does not underline it, it just leaves it there.