About

'We all remember the special atmosphere of the war. And so I tried to reconstruct the loudness, the rumours, the speech of the war so as to build something like a polyphony, to hear an echo of the voices of war.' - Aleksei German

Major Lopatin (renowned Soviet stage and screen clown Yuri Nikulin, here cast against type) is a military journalist granted twenty days of leave from his duties to return to his remote hometown of Tashkent. He is to deliver the belongings of a fallen comrade to the deceased boy’s family, as well as consult on a war film being adapted from his own writings. Over the course of his visit, Lopatin begins a gentle romance with a seamstress working on the film and observes the gap between his wartime experiences and their portrayal thousands of kilometres from the front.

Twenty Days Without War is an adaptation of autobiographical writings by noted author Konstantin Simonov, who also wrote the screenplay. He had been impressed by German’s Trial on the Road and used his influence to hire the now scandalous director to collaborate on the project. Like the director’s previous feature, this work too would be immediately banned by state censors, though this time only for a year.

German’s film is a lyrical portrait of the struggles that exist away from the battlefield in times of conflict. Set during the Second World War, German worked with people who experienced the war firsthand and drew on his own childhood recollections to construct a realistic, yet deeply poetic, film with a tender relationship at its core.

Ages 15+