Rent Occupied (2016)

Excellent Russian Film set in WWII which all Teachers should watch - Occupied review by PV

This is a superb film - also called "I Am a Teacher / Ya Uchitel". Rare to have a teacher as a hero in a movie, but here it is.

Superb direction in this. The same director of the brilliant BATTLE OF SEVASTOPOL about a female sniper.

Genuinely surprising and shocking - who knew 200,000 Russians joined the Nazis in WWII? Maybe after being captured. And this is Russia, not Ukraine.

Pushkin gets mentioned and featured, in a classroom. Famous Russian poet.

How a small community deals with invasion and rule by both Nazis and Communists is deal with here. As in another great film The Occupation (also called My Name is Sara from 2019) set in Ukraine.

It plays with ideas of loyalty. It also features Russian women transported as slave labour to Germany - 8 million forced labourers were sent to the Great Reich in WWII - it needed workers and so many young men had been recruited into the army to fight the USSR.

I was not expecting much from this but it is one of thr best recent Russian films I have seen and one of the best ever films set in wartime.

Dreadful subtitles in parts and none for credits at end.

4 stars., Maybe 4.5.

Well worth seeing - Occupied review by SB

There have been a lot of films concerned with the German occupation of Western Europe during WWII, but this one is more unusual – a Russian film about the Germn occupation of the western USSR in 1941 onwards whilst the battles of the Eastern front were going on. No battles are on view - the setting here is a quiet and poor village where the Germans are already installed with their local collaborators (what is collaboration in such circumstamnces?). The lead character is a teacher who now has to teach his bored pupils the Nazi-inspired curriculum, but probably there was no more enthusiasm for the previous Soviet one. He gets by, living with a beautiful widow

(Yuliya Peresild) and her disaffected son. He finds secret joy in Pushkin.

Then a series of events in the village, all quite mundane and probable in the circumstances, lead him down a slippery slope which starts with his trying to avoid involvement but ends with his undertaking a defiant act of resistance - which by analogy anyone else might also undertake.

The settings, acting and so on are all very good. The subtitles are often dodgy, and sometimes missing altogether. That is the only negative with a compelling film.