Featured Image Credit: Janus Films
Topics: TV And Film, Ukraine, Russia
Britt Jones
The child star of the highest rated narrative film of all time on review site Letterboxd had an interesting history following the gruelling shoot - which has taken a sinister turn in recent years.
It has nearly been 40 years since the release of this flick, which could leave any hardened person sobbing like a baby after just two hours.
The anti-war film has a 95 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so you know it’s worth its stuff.
It tells the tale of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Belarus, where Soviet soldiers attempted an uprising, with the help of a recruited child soldier.
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Having been directed by Elem Klimov and based on the 1971 novel Khatyn by Ales Adamovich, and the I Am from the Fiery Village survivor testimonies, the film is based on witness accounts of that time.
Viewers see young teenage Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), as he joins the Belarusian resistance and is then traumatised throughout the war.
At the start, he’s naïve and young, and then he slowly becomes hardened and filled with terror.
In the film - 1987’s Come and See - Flyora barely utters a word, so his silent trauma is expressed mostly by his expressions.
This includes a 25-minute sequence that shows Flyora being forced by Nazi soldiers to watch an entire village burn alive in a church.
Kravchenko’s most notable film was terrifying to act in, with the director allegedly enrolling him into hypnosis so he could endure the church scene, only for the child actor to decide against it.
The teen was also supposedly shown real footage of concentration camps to prepare for the role, and he also subjected himself to a gruelling diet in order to portray his emaciated character.
Kravchenko took a decade-long break from acting following his harrowing debut and has since racked up nearly 80 acting credits.
However, in 2023, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine added him to the list of individuals posing a threat to national security due to his 2021 flick, Solntsepyok.
The film depicted the takeover of Eastern Ukraine by Russian PMC Wagner mercenaries as a positive thing, and the film was shot in occupied Crimea. The Conversation reports it 'primed Russians for war with Ukraine'.
Russian singer-propagandist Yaroslav Dronov was also added to the list, per Pravda, in 2023 for singing to Russian soldiers in occupied parts of Ukraine.
Now, more than 200 people sit on the list.