Irish Film Institute -Come and See

Come and See

Director: Elem Klimov

U.S.S.R.| 1985. English subtitles. Colour. 142 min.


Soviet Belorussia, near the Polish border, 1943. Florya, a young partisan left behind as his unit moves to prepare for a renewed German advance, returns to his village to find only a mass of bodies, including those of his family, and later witnesses the entire population of a nearby town being machine-gunned and burnt to death. This epic, allegorical and traumatising enactment of the hellish experience of war (especially its effect upon a generation of Soviet people) is rendered by director Elem Klimov as a disorienting and undifferentiated amalgam of almost lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare.

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