Come and See

Come and See is a 1985 Soviet anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov and starring Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. Its screenplay, written by Klimov and Ales Adamovich, is based on the 1971 novel Khatyn and the 1977 memoir I Am from the Fiery Village, of which Adamovich was a co-author. Klimov had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before he could be allowed to produce the film in its entirety. The film's plot focuses on the Nazi German occupation of Belarus, and the events as witnessed by a young Belarusian partisan teenager named Flyora, who—against his mother's wishes—joins the Belarusian resistance movement, and thereafter depicts the Nazi atrocities and human suffering inflicted upon the Eastern European region's populace. The film mixes hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and philosophical existentialism with poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes. Come and See received generally positive critical reception upon release, and received the FIPRESCI prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. It has since come to be considered one of the greatest films of all time; in the 2022 Sight & Sound directors' poll, it ranked 41st. Plot In 1943, two Belarusian boys dig in a sand-filled trench looking for abandoned rifles in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. Their village elder warns them not to dig up the weapons as it would arouse the suspicions of the occupying Germans. One of the boys, Flyora, finds an SVT-40 rifle. The boys' activities are noticed by an Fw 189 reconnaissance aircraft, flying overhead.