The Taras Family

10/15/1945

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1hr 22min

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War

,Drama

STORY

Russian filmmaker Mark Donskoi, of "The Gorky Trilogy" fame, was responsible for the postwar Soviet drama The Taras Family (originally Nepokorenniye, and also released as Unvanquished and Unconquered). A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kiev. The drama focusses on the travails of a typical Soviet family and on the efforts by the Germans to force the reopening of a local munitions factory. The film is at its most grimly effective in a long sequence wherein the Nazis conduct a search for Jewish escapees, culminating in a horribly graphic re-creation of the slaughter of the Jews at Babi Yar. While Donskoi was critically lambasted for his cinematic "sloppyiness" during this sequence (hand-held camera, rapid cuts etc.), it can now be seen that he was attempting a realistic, documentarylike interpretation of this infamous Nazi atrocity.

CAST & CREW

    Cast

  • Mikhail Vysotsky
  • Amvrosi Buchma
  • Daniil Sagal
  • Yevgeni Ponomarenko
  • Mikhail Troyanovsky

    Director

  • Mark Donskoy

INFORMATION

    Production Companies

  • Dovzhenko Film Studios

    Production Countries

  • Soviet Union

LANGUAGES

  • Russian