Twenty Days Without War

Twenty Days Without War (1976) is Aleksei German's wartime drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. It is the winter of 1942. Front-line correspondent Lopatin takes a twenty-day leave from Stalingrad and travels to Tashkent, far behind the lines.

Still deafened by the front, he finds peacetime strange and almost unreal — mud-soaked clay houses, bread ration cards clenched in a fist, radio bulletins, death notices, and theatres that somehow keep their doors open. A film crew is adapting his war essays. Over these twenty days Lopatin sees in the new year of 1943, speaks with a dead soldier's widow, and falls into a brief, searing romance. Yuri Nikulin, in a rare dramatic turn, and Lyudmila Gurchenko play it restrained, with no tears to spare.

Konstantin Simonov wrote the screenplay from his own novellas, and German filmed a war without a single battle in it — assembled instead from daily life, faces and long silences. That is exactly why it lands so hard. Stream Twenty Days Without War (1976) on iFILM.