War

War (2002)

Война

During the bloody war in Chechnya, a British couple and two Russian soldiers are taken hostage by Chechen rebels. Two of the hostages are then released to bring the money for the British woman who is forced to wait for the ransom.

Date of release
2002-03-14
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (116)
Runtime
2h 0m
Genres
War, Drama
Director
Aleksei Balabanov

Casting

Interesting facts

War is a 2002 Russian war film by Aleksei Balabanov about the Second Chechen War, starring Aleksei Chadov and Ian Kelly.

Production

Aleksei Balabanov wrote the scenario for the film in 1998. after he saw on television the severed heads of English specialists who worked in Chechnya.

Balabanov tried to make a film that was as realistic as possible, to the point of naturalism. Before filming, he talked to former captives from the First Chechen War, traveled through the villages of Kabardino-Balkaria, met with the commander of the troops in Chechnya, General Viktor Kazantsev, and watched videotapes with chronicles of Chechen atrocities. He showed some of these films to the English actor Ian Kelly.

The work was difficult from a psychological point of view. Before that, we had watched tapes of people being killed for real, recorded by militants. This spectacle made a very strong impression, to an extent that I didn’t even expect. I probably walked around for three days like I’d been hit on the head with a hammer. I liked wearing striped shirts, and they killed one paratrooper in a striped shirt.

The film was shot in Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Chechnya, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tobolsk, and London.

This was the first film role of the then twenty-year-old aspiring actor Alexei Chadov. To film the scenes with the captives lying in the pit, the crew dug out a real pit. The actors laid there filthy for several hours, as Balabanov wanted everything to be as realistic as possible. The scene with actress Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė floating naked in a cold rapid was filmed without using a stunt double.

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

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