Saturday, January 10, 2009

IDI I SMOTRI (COME AND SEE) 1985

THIS MOVIE IS AN ABSOLUTE MUST. CLICK HERE FOR INFO.

This is what THE NEW YORK TIMES said about it:
"A rare look at World War II from the Soviet side, Come and See is based on the real-life experiences of Ales Adamovich, who fought with Russian partisans in Belarus in 1943, when the Nazis systematically torched over 600 villages and slaughtered their inhabitants. Adamovich and director Elem Klimov co-authored the screenplay, which shows the horrors through the eyes of a 13-year-old peasant boy named Florya (Alexei Kravchenko). Over his single mother's protests, he joins the partisans, but they leave him behind in their camp when they set off to fight the Germans. Glascha (Olga Mironova), a lovely young girl, befriends him, but the two are caught in the midst of an air raid which leaves Florya nearly deaf. Now utterly frightened, Florya and Glascha return to his village to find it in ruins, and, in one of the film's many harrowing scenes, they wade through a swamp to locate the survivors. Now committed to seek vengeance for the death of his mother and neighbors, Florya returns to the front, but finds himself in a village that's right in the path of the Nazi firestorm. A band of partisans arrive too late to save the village but in time to capture and mete out justice to several of the Nazi officers. Awarded the Grand Prix at the 1985 Moscow Film Festival, Come and See is notable as an honest and unflinching portrait of one of the darker chapters among many in the history of the World War II."



It's real, brutal, it shows war as it really is - horrible. Nothing like Hollywood movies, glamorizing heroes and doing propaganda for the army. My wife couldn't take it, she cried at the end after being in shock for two hours.
Russians lost close to 25 million people in the WWII, they suffered more than anyone else; the Chinese were second in number of victims .... but no one talks about this.

After seeing a movie like this, with scenes like German soldiers burning women and children alive in a church, it's hard to turn the TV on, and realize that NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, has changed. We humans have learned NOTHING. Innocents are still suffering all around the world, and scumbags are getting rich off off it.
Only the uniforms have changed, and the propaganda that Joseph Goebbels invented has become more sophisticated.

In his words
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
and
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

Sound familiar?