Liberation - Part 1 : The Fire Bulge

"Liberation – Part 1: The Fire Bulge" (1970) — watch online on iFILM. Director Yuri Ozerov opens his five-part epic on the summer of 1943, when Soviet command prepared to seize the initiative from Wehrmacht forces after eighteen months of retreat. The armored clash that rolled across the fields around Prokhorovka and Ponyri had no parallel in scale for that entire war.

Ozerov's camera doesn't stay in the trenches. It moves between front-line infantry, command maps, and the Kremlin, tracing the battle from every altitude. Nikolai Olyalin, Larisa Golubkina, and Mikhail Ulyanov lead the cast in this Soviet-Italian-Polish co-production, which staged its tank sequences with actual hardware.

A sober opening to the cycle — the film earns its running time with tactical detail most war epics skip. Stream "Liberation: The Fire Bulge" (1970) online on iFILM.