Zoya

Zoya (1944) is a Soviet war drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Lev Arnshtam and starring Galina Vodyanitskaya as the eighteen-year-old partisan whose story became one of the defining images of wartime Soviet resistance.

November 1941. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya goes behind German lines with a partisan unit outside Moscow, is caught during a mission, and endures days of interrogation without giving up a single name. On the gallows in the village of Petrischevo she speaks — her words were in Pravda within weeks. Vodyanitskaya plays the role without theatrical anguish, keeping close to the specific and the ordinary, which is exactly what makes it land.

Arnshtam made the film in 1944, while the war was still being fought. Alexei Batalov — later one of Soviet cinema's leading actors — appears here in his first screen role, aged sixteen. Zoya was posthumously named Hero of the Soviet Union. Stream Zoya online on iFILM.