Sunflower

Sunflower (I girasoli, 1970) is Vittorio De Sica's aching wartime drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Giovanna and Antonio fall for each other fast and marry almost at once, since a new husband earns a brief reprieve from the front. The honeymoon ends quickly, though, and Antonio is sent not to warm Africa but into the Russian snows near Stalingrad.

The war is over, yet he never comes home — listed only as missing. Giovanna refuses to accept that he is dead and spends her last savings traveling across Russia to find him, through endless fields of sunflowers that grew over thousands of fallen soldiers. Sophia Loren plays a woman whose love outruns all reason; Marcello Mastroianni is the soldier the war ground down into someone else entirely. Lyudmila Savelyeva appears as Masha, a Russian woman whose fate becomes tangled in their story.

Shot on location in the USSR — one of the first Western productions ever filmed there — the picture carries a Henry Mancini score whose main theme grew as famous as the film itself. This is a story about how war breaks even the survivors, and about a love with nowhere left to return. Stream Sunflower (1970) online on iFILM.