The Cranes Are Flying is a 1957 Soviet film about the Second World War. It depicts the cruelty of war and the damage done to the Soviet psyche as a result of war, which was known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War.
Film poster
An illustrated PSE with scenes from the film: A. Batalov as Boris, T. Samojlova as Veronika. Russia, 2003.
Cinema of the Soviet Union
The cinema of the Soviet Union includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia. At the same time, the nation's film industry, which was fully nationalized throughout most of the country's history, was guided by philosophies and laws propounded by the monopoly Soviet Communist Party which introduced a new view on the cinema, socialist realism, which was different from the one before or after the existence of the Soviet Union.
Still from Grigory Chukhray's Ballad of a Soldier (1959)
1950 postage stamp, marking 30 years of Soviet film. It quotes Stalin, who calls cinema "the greatest medium of mass agitation."