Battling on: what Russia's unrelenting appetite for second world war films means

Heroism, tragedy - and lots of tanks ... the Russian film industry's obsession with the war is as strong as the west's - but they convey a very different message

The second world war ended - as we all know - 75 years ago. Many things have happened since then, yet the war retains an unending fascination for politicians and for makers of big-budget cinema. Since films aren't made by accident, there's a reason for the many, costly movies about events that happened long ago. War movies aren't historical documents, but signs of our current times. Saving Private Ryan (1998) persuaded us that Americans fight wars justly, and with a moral conscience. The mega-budget Pearl Harbor (2001) suited the aspirations of the Project for the New American Century. Dunkirk (2017) celebrated Britain going it alone, gamely and successfully improvising her European exit.

In Russia, however, things are very different. In 1985, the director Elim Klimov made that rare thing, a genuinely anti-war movie: Come and See. But such things are rare. What do the current generation of Russian war films have to tell us? I sat down to watch as many as I could. Most stand in the shadow of Klimov's film and detest war. But they did so with widely different budgets, and in different ways.