This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty—rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov’s subjective camera work and expressionistic sound design. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget anti-war film ever made.
This story is based on documentary facts and refers to “Khatyn novel”, written by Adamovich. The authors have chosen the exact places and events that have become a symbol of people’s misfortune and suffering. Flera is a sixteen years old boy, dug up carbine among torn of barbed wire, rusted machine-gun belts and shot helmets. Then he went to the forests to the partisans. At the very beginning of the film, Flera is a kid, but after going through the horror of the fascist punitive actions, he becomes an adult, frighteningly adult and becomes an old man. The war distorted once tender, childish features of the boy and turned them into wrinkles. The protagonist, driven by a sacred feeling of the fight against the Nazi invaders, in defiance of his mother goes to the partisan detachment. The circles of Hell of the fascist atrocities in Belarus are rushing before his eyes like the worst nightmare.
