Tomorrow Was the War

Tomorrow Was the War (1987)

Завтра была война

This movie is based on a novel by Boris Vasiliev and describes life in a small Russian provincial town in 1940 - one year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The main characters of the film are ordinary Soviet high school students. They study in the Soviet school, try to be correct and ideological Komsomol activists. But not always the “correctness” suggested by the teachers coincides with the inner convictions of young souls - it is difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that their relatives and loved ones are suddenly “enemies of the people”.

Date of release
1987-10-18
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (31)
Runtime
1h 29m
Genres
Drama
Director
Yuriy Kara

Casting

Interesting facts

Tomorrow Was the War is a 1987 Soviet war drama film directed by Yuri Kara based on the eponymous novella by Boris Vasilyev. The film was Kara's thesis at VGIK.

Production

In his youth, director Yuri Kara read the book "Tomorrow Was the War" by Boris Vasilyev and wanted to make a film based on it. He knew that many directors attempted to get permission to adapt the novel from Goskino but all were rejected. But Kara was granted the right to film the adaptation by his teacher Sergei Gerasimov at VGIK. As the film was his dissertation, it was not taken seriously enough to be under censorship.

Initially the picture was planned as a short, a three-reeler. But the Gorky Film Studio became interested in the film and shooting continued which caused it to become a full-fledged feature film. It was shot without sound or finished text, this is visible in many scenes where the dubbing does not fully match the mouth movements.

As it was a student project, many actors played for free in the film.

The film's soundtrack includes, besides the classical compositions by Antonio Vivaldi original music from the 1930s. The war, which is about to take place, is indicated with the song The Sacred War. The film is dedicated to Sergei Gerasimov who died before the film was released. It was Natalia Negoda's screen debut, she plays the student Zina in the film. Her mother in the film Yelena Molchenko actually was the same age as Negoda.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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