Featured Image Credit: Belarusfilm
Topics: News, Film and TV, World News
Kit Roberts
A film has been called one of the 'most disturbing' war films ever made.
War films are notoriously difficult to get right, with any director having to think hard about the picture of war they want to create.
For example, some war films - titles which tend to come out during the wars themselves - are openly pieces of propaganda designed to vilify the enemy and glorify your side.
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Others take a more nuanced view, showing the gritty reality and the conflicting emotions and experiences of the individuals involved, for example, Saving Private Ryan.
Some fall somewhere between these two versions, not shying away from the horror but also clearly in favour of one team, for example The Hurt Locker which despite its psychological profile of a bomb disposal expert is still saturated with US patriotism.
Then there's another kind of war film, that simply goes all out to show the utter horror of how war impacts people.
That's what Come and See from 1985 does unflinchingly.
The movie is a Soviet-Belerusian historical anti war film which looks at the Eastern Front of World War Two.
Specifically, it looks at the Nazi occupation of Belarus and the effect that this had on the lives of Belarusian people.
Before we get into the film, it's worth pointing out that the concentration and extermination camps in the Holocaust were overwhelmingly located in Eastern Europe, including Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and Belarus.
So the centre of where the atrocities was taking place was in Eastern Europe, and it was Eastern Europe which was most devastated not just by the camps themselves.
There were also the squadrons of Nazi soldiers whose specific job it was to round up and murder any undesirables they could find including Jews, Romanies, communists, and many others.
It's this part of the war that Come and See is set in, where Nazi invaders were intent on exterminating entire populations.
Director Elem Klimov shows the unrelenting horror which swept across Eastern Europe at this time.
This follows a young man who is caught up in the Nazi occupation of Belarus and a resistance group that pushes back.
Rather than focusing just on soldiers or civilians, the film shows how those two effectively became inseparable in this occupation.
This is through the actions of the Nazis themselves including brutalising a young woman, burning down houses, and staging 'mock' executions to torture civilians.
But it's also the immense sense of guilt and betrayal felt by the protagonist as his community is devastated by the occupation.