Agitbrigade 'Beat The Enemy!'

World War II is raging on the Eastern front, but the soldier Nikanor has been sent to Siberia: as a prisoner and as the leader of a motley group of entertainers who travel from village to village giving concerts... "In 1944, 16-year-old Melnikov, the future director of 'The Captain of Chukotka', sailed up the Amur with a propaganda team, learned to drink moonshine, and saw the one-armed veteran Fyodor satisfy a team of fisherwomen who had gone crazy without men. The hero is the son of a general who has been shot, and the propaganda team accordionist and artist are exiles. There are also exiled Kalmyks, Germans and Estonians, sadists from the NKVD who deal with a native deserter and hunter about to pleasure the fat projectionist girl. But the film is about something else entirely: the river of time, along which, as in Apocalypse Now, the heroes travel: space becomes time. Melnikov is one of the best directors of his generation, true to the supposedly old-fashioned form of film narrative." Mikhail Tropimenkov, Pulse St. Petersburg