These days, both the West and Russia often make war films for propaganda purposes and often distort the historical truth. Some films, however, have managed to depict those events quite authentically. Here are a dozen of the best.
1. Stalingrad (1993)
Eight years prior to the release of Enemy at the Gates (2001), which showed the Red Army as a herd of dumb cattle, the Germans made a much more objective but, unfortunately, less well-known film about the Battle of Stalingrad. To its credit, it didn’t feature Soviet infantry mounting madcap attacks against enemy machine guns with just one rifle for every three soldiers, ubiquitous barrier troops and commissars that looked more like evil orcs.
In Stalingrad, we follow a group of Wehrmacht soldiers who are sent from warm and sunny Italy to the icy hell of the Eastern Front. German and Soviet soldiers are shown as professionals performing their military duty. They are not a caricature, but ordinary people equally capable of acting heroically and succumbing to cowardice and panic.
2. Only Old Men Are Going to Battle (1973)
This is a story about Soviet fighter pilots who took part in the battle for the Dnieper in 1943. The film is not so much about military action as about the tragedy of a generation whose youth was stolen by the war. The life of a military pilot during the war was often very short, so those who managed to survive several sorties considered themselves “old men”, although they were barely 18 years old.
3. Unknown Soldier (2017)
The 2017 film is the third adaptation of Finnish writer Väinö Linna’s novel about the everyday life of the Finnish army during the so-called Continuation War when Finland sided with Hitler against the USSR in order to regain the territories lost in the Winter War and to annex Soviet Karelia.
Unknown Soldier is free from the usual Western stereotypes about Russians as savage barbarians from the East. True, they are capable of actions one can’t be proud of, such as destroying a lone vehicle carrying wounded Finns. At the same time, Finnish soldiers are not presented as angels either: the film features the shooting of a captured Soviet prisoner of war without trial.
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https://www.rbth.com/arts/332091-12-true-to-life-films
