It does not surprise me that this short (91 minutes) B/W movie that was made 50 years ago in the Soviet Union during the short period called "ottepel'" or "the thaw", has gained so much love and admiration among the movie lovers over the world. It is sublime and beautifully filmed. Some scenes feel like there were made way ahead of their time. Sergei Urusevsky's camera work and creative discoveries were included in the text books and widely imitated. The film tells the moving and timeless story of love destroyed by merciless war but eternally alive in the memory of a young woman. It is also the film about loyalty, memories, ability to live on when it seems there is nothing to live for; it is about forgiveness, and about hope. The film received (absolutely deservingly) the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival and Tatiana Samoilova was chosen as a recipient of a special award at Cannes for playing Veronika, the young girl happily in love with the best man in the world in the beginning of the movie. After separation with her beloved who went to the front, the loss of her family in the bomb ride, and the marriage to the man she never loved and only wished he never existed, she turned to the shadow of herself, she became dead inside. Her long journey to redemption, to finally accepting death of her beloved and to learning how to live with it, is a fascinating and heartbreaking one and it simply won't leave any viewer indifferent.
For me, the movie is very personal and dear because I was born and grew up in the city where its characters lived and were so happy in the beginning. I walked the same streets, squares, and bridges over the Moskva River. Every family in the former Soviet Union had lost at least one but often more than one family member to a combat or to the concentration camp or to the ghetto or to hunger, cold, and illnesses during WWII and my family is not exception. My mother and grandmother knew the horrors of war and never healing pain of losses not just from the movies and the books. "Cranes are Flying" speaks to me clearly and honestly and touches me very deeply. It is a masterpiece of movie making but it is a part of my life - my background, my memory, and my past.
For me, the movie is very personal and dear because I was born and grew up in the city where its characters lived and were so happy in the beginning. I walked the same streets, squares, and bridges over the Moskva River. Every family in the former Soviet Union had lost at least one but often more than one family member to a combat or to the concentration camp or to the ghetto or to hunger, cold, and illnesses during WWII and my family is not exception. My mother and grandmother knew the horrors of war and never healing pain of losses not just from the movies and the books. "Cranes are Flying" speaks to me clearly and honestly and touches me very deeply. It is a masterpiece of movie making but it is a part of my life - my background, my memory, and my past.