Rent Edge of War (2010)

Unusual - Edge of War review by SB

This Russian film deals with a time and place virtually unknown in the West - the period in 1945 and subsequent years when many Soviet POWs held in wartime Germany were returned to the USSR and then interned in Siberian camps due to being suspected of collaboration with the Germans.

This film takes a discharged Red Army soldier who suffers mentally from the effect of combat injuries. He ends up deep in the Siberian taiga at a logging camp. He is a train engineer, and virtually bulldozes his way into the camp and a job on th trains which haul timber. He takes up with one of the women internees, who has a child she brought back from Germany. One day he gets across the huge river near the camp which used to be crossed by a now-broken rail bridge, and on the other bank he finds an abandoned locomotive and a young German woman who attacks him. Her story, and how they slowly come together through hostility and many adventures to a life away from the camps, forms the core of the film.

The performances are superb and the locations etc very authentic (although as usual the women have skin far too good for what they are meant to have gone through).

The film is in Russian with English sub-titles, and when German is spoken there is also Russian voiceover of the lines; this isn't too distracting.

Well worth seeing if you want something different. Some violence and sex, but nothing excessive or gratuitous; also some dark humour, especially if you love the melancholia of the Russian people.