Harpur Cinema Presents: Come and See

Elem Klimov, Soviet Union, 1985, 142 min

Friday, November 4, and Sunday, November 6: Lecture Hall 6, 7:30 PM. Doors open at 7:00 pm. $4 Single Admission.

This widely acclaimed film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a stunning, senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in present-day Belarus, teenage Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko, in one of the screen’s most searing depictions of anguish since Renee Falconetti’s Joan of Arc) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty-rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov’s subjective camerawork and expressionistic sound design. Nearly suppressed by Soviet censors who took eight years to approve the script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.