Genre: Drama
Duration: 85 mins
Format: 35mm
Director: Vera Glagoleva
Cast: Alexander Baluev, Mikhail Khmurov, Natalia Surkova, Julia Melnikova, Natalia Kudryashova, Anna Nakhapetova, Ksenia Surkova,
Fedor Koposov







Awards: Grand Prix for Best Film (Sofia International Film Festival 2010) Grand Prix & Audience Award (Honfleur, France, Festival of Russian Cinema 2009)

The film brings to light an unknown chapter in the history of World War II. May 8, 1945. Major Maxim Prokhorov of the NKVD arrives on a small island in northern Russia. There are eleven people there: five young women, five children (aged one to three), and a guard, Captain Karp Nichiporuk. The young mothers, each with her own tragic story, had been exiled to the island from territories occupied by the German Army along with their children who were fathered by German soldiers.

The arrival of the Major interrupts the casual life on the island. The Major has a task: clear the island and its inhabitants to make way for a training camp for saboteurs. A boat will soon arrive to take the mothers and their children away. Only the Major and Guard really know what will happen when the boat finally arrives the next morning. Russian cinema has an uncanny ability to make pictures which portray the reality of characters experiencing sincere pain, ensuing every viewer is emotionally overtaken by a sense of righteous compassion. One War is a powerful example of such cinema.

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