Ballad of a Soldier

Grigori Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (1959) belongs with The Cranes Are Flying among the great humanist war films of the Soviet thaw. It travelled the world, earning an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay and a special prize at Cannes. Its hero is no warrior, only a boy who wants to get home.

Vladimir Ivashov plays Alyosha, the young soldier granted leave, who spends most of it helping the strangers he meets on the way and falling, shyly, for a girl named Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko). Chukhrai builds the film as a road movie across a wounded landscape, and its episodic encounters add up to a tender mosaic of a society living through the war's privations far from the front. The tone is gentle throughout, and the film earns every bit of the emotion it draws from its audience.

A big international success, it changed how Western audiences saw Soviet cinema, presenting ordinary Russian life with warmth and dignity at the height of the Cold War. Its faith in small human kindnesses influenced humanist film-making well beyond Soviet borders. Modest in scale and deeply moving, Ballad of a Soldier is one of the most heartbreaking films ever made about the home front. It has been restored and is still widely screened, and it makes plain that some of the most humane cinema of the period was made behind the Iron Curtain.