Elem Klimov · 1985 · survival

Elem Klimov's 1985 film, one of the most harrowing war films ever made. In Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1943, a boy named Flyora digs up a rifle and joins the partisans, only to be plunged into an odyssey through the devastated countryside. Separated from the fighters, he wanders a landscape of atrocity toward the village of Perekhody, where an SS unit's massacre strips away the last of his childhood.

1. 1
   The village

   The Belarusian hamlet where the boy Flyora digs a buried rifle from the sand and, against his mother's pleas, leaves to join the partisans hiding in the forest.

2. 2
   The forest camp

   The partisan base in the woods where Flyora is left behind when the fighters move out, beginning his lonely wandering through a countryside descending into horror.

3. 3
   Perekhody

   The village where Flyora witnesses an SS punitive unit herd the inhabitants into a barn and burn them alive - the massacre that ages the boy's face into a mask of the war's madness.