Come and See

Elem Klimov made Come and See in 1985, after eight years of Soviet censors blocking the script. The film was eventually approved as part of the official 40th-anniversary commemoration of Victory Day, and went on to win the Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival the same year. It is one of the few films from late-Soviet cinema to be permanently embedded in the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier — at number 21 in the 2022 critics' chart.

1943, occupied Belarus. Flyora, a thirteen-year-old village boy played by the non-professional Aleksei Kravchenko, joins the local partisan resistance and is plunged into the Nazi Einsatzgruppen reprisals against his homeland — part of the wider campaign in which the Wehrmacht and SS would destroy 628 Belarusian villages along with their inhabitants. Klimov used live ammunition in several scenes, and Kravchenko's visible ageing across the 142-minute runtime is partly a function of the genuine psychological toll of the shoot. Klimov had begun work on the project shortly after the death of his wife, the director Larisa Shepitko, in a 1979 car accident; Come and See stands in part as a memorial to her unfinished filmmaking life.

The film's title is taken from the Book of Revelation. Its formal innovations — Steadicam-tracking work that was almost entirely new to Soviet productions of the period, the inarticulate moans on the soundtrack, the broken-fourth-wall stares directly into camera — have influenced everyone from Terrence Malick to Klimov's Russian and Ukrainian descendants. After completing this film, Klimov made no other features. He felt he had exhausted what cinema could do.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most uncompromising film ever made about the Eastern Front, and one of the few works that genuinely earns the cliché of unwatchable greatness. A film whose existence is itself an argument for the medium.