Come and See

Director: Elem Klimov

1985 / 140min / DCP

Klimov’s final film, drawing upon his own experiences in the Battle of Stalingrad, is a devastating immersion into the horrors of the WWII Eastern Front as seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old Belarusian boy (Aleksey Kravchenko) who joins the partisan resistance to fight against the Nazi occupation, only to have any fantasies of battlefield glory disappear with his first exposure to the boundless brutality of total war. Approximating his panicked protagonist’s disoriented point-of-view with a wildly careening Steadicam, Klimov’s lucid yet delirious depiction of battlefield brutality has the terrible intensity and immediacy of a waking nightmare.