The Forty-First

During World War II, earnest young Russian soldier Alyosha Skvortsov is rewarded with a short leave of absence for performing a heroic deed on the battlefield. Feeling homesick, he decides to visit his mother. Due to his kindhearted nature, however, Alyosha is repeatedly sidetracked by his efforts to help those he encounters, including a lovely girl named Shura. In his tour of a country devastated by war, he struggles to keep hope alive.

In this provocative Soviet drama, an aged couple are left homeless after their farm burns down, and they head off to live with their impoverished daughter. When they arrive, they are appalled to learn that she has abandoned her child and husband to run away with a married man. The husband is now an alcoholic, so the grandparents stay on to support their son-in-law in his time of need and to help care for their grandson. Later, the errant daughter is dumped by her lover and returns. Many fights ensue until the grandfather banishes his troublesome daughter from their lives.

The action takes place during the Great Patriotic War. Peasant Matryona Bystrova loses her husband at the front, then her eldest son goes missing. Matryona decides to save the youngest son at all costs and shelters him from being drafted into the army in the attic of the house until the end of the war. But it turns out that saving her son, she condemns him to spiritual death, and herself to torment of conscience. A private story about the mother of a deserter grows to epic proportions...

A politically neutral man is arrested and tortured in prerevolutionary Lisbon, and forced to make, and act on, a political commitment. …

For many years, Sasha Lvova has been waiting for the return of her lover, pilot Aleksei Astakhov, refusing to believe in his death at the front. And he really returns to her and his son after captivity, but this is a completely different person, rejected by society, expelled from the profession. It is difficult to say how Aleksei’s fate would have been if it hadn’t for Sasha’s love, her ability to survive in the most difficult circumstances.

January / February 1993 marked the 50th anniversary of the German surrender at Stalingrad. On the occasion of this anniversary, a television documentary was produced in German-Russian cooperation, which, following a classic documentary pattern, allows 6 contemporary witnesses, former opponents of the war, to recount their personal experiences in front of the camera.

About the work of one of the greatest masters of Soviet cinema — director Mark Donskoy.

This film tells whether people around the world remember the significance of the Battle of Stalingrad.