Synopsis
Some viewers may see "9th Company" as Russia's "Apocalypse Now" or "Full Metal Jacket" - but Fyodor Bondarchuk's directorial debut stands on its own. It's Russia's first real war film. Not anti-war, not militarist - but a genuine war film. Not about the glories of Russian weapons, but about the glory of those who will fight with them down to their last bullets.Fyodor Bondarchuk makes his directing debut at the age of 38 - the same age at which his father, Sergei Bondarchuk, made his own classic "Destiny of a Man" back in 1959. That film caught the collective experience of a generation whose life would change forever after the night of June 22 1.941. "9th Company" is a collective memorial to those young men who never reached their own maturity, perishing in the mountains of Afghanistan, in Abkhazia, in Chechnya...
In training the legendary 9th Company had it drummed into their heads that they weren't individuals -but part of the wider body of the Soviet fighting forces. And in reality the lives of its soldiers were shared in every sense. From the shared reserve magazines of a rifle, to the
body of the training camp's girl, "Snow-White". From stolen tins of meat to the mess-tins of drink on the eve of a demob that they would never live to see. To their daily batches of firing on the enemy.
Life may have been shared - but every death remains an individual one. Like their deaths on Heights 3234, fighting to the last to defend the convoys retreating at the end of the war.
Radio connections were down - so they couldn't know that the war was over. The closing cry of pain from the last soldier left alive from the 9th Company rang out over the mountains of Afghanistan back in 1989. Now the world will hear it too...
