Synopsis

With an introduction by Andreas Ungerböck/Publisher RAY.

In 1943, the Nazi terror reaches its peak in Belarus, and a teenage boy called Flyora decides to join the partisans. But the dream of great adventures quickly turns into a never-ending odyssey directly towards the deepest chasms of the human existence. When the young partisan returns to his parents’ farm one day, he learns the truth about the murders of his mother and sisters by the hands of SS officers. Later on he has to witness the execution of his entire village, each resident being burnt alive. Images of piles of corpses take turns with deafening bomb explosions and represent impressions the entire cinema audience won’t be able to forget. When destiny changes one day, salvation fails to appear and things don’t take a turn for the better. Even Mozart’s music doesn’t help anymore. Despite the incredibly realistical brutality, the fact-based masterpiece by the Russian director Elem Klimov appears surreally aesthetical, and might just be the best antiwar film of all times, or it comes pretty close at least. Come and See is disturbing as well as thought-provoking and definitely nothing for weak nerves. The American pope of critics Roger Ebert expressed himself as follows: “This 1985 film from Russia is one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead.”