4 Days in May (2011)

Just perfect...

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

I watched this film to practice my German ... most of it is in Russian! I enjoyed this film much more than expected. It is well acted and directed and demonstrates very well how ordinary men deal with extraordinary circumstances. It is a moving film and illustrates how war is never a black and white, the good people versus the bad people, good against bad. War is designed by the few and fought by the many, teachers and musicians amongst the soldiers, I liked it very much and would give it an even higher score were it not for the clichés. But it does demonstrate how armies in war situations are composed of men and women who might otherwise have preferred quite a different life.

Prussia 1945; 8 million refugees, 5 million raped, 3 million dead and countless personal tragedies. One of the most savage and tragic events of human history. 4 days in May records just one of the fragments that made up this tragedy. A beach somewhere on the Baltic. A 12 year old boy caught up in the madness of war wants to fight alongside the teenage soldiers who face the relentless Russian advance. And so he neglects to lead the local orphans to the rescue boat and they are all captured by the Soviets.This production is so magnificently directed, skillfully scripted and beautifully filmed that I should not reveal any more of the story. You simply have to see it. It will grab you from the very first seconds and keep you entirely transfixed until the final emotionally draining frame. It still drew tears even at the third viewing. And 4 days in May is still highly relevant today. It displays the foundation logic of current German neutrality. War appears so tragic, so insane and so ultimately futile that no sensible person would ever participate in it. But most of all the film shows that there is no good or bad side in war. There are only a few individuals who become deranged through the power they enjoy because of it. Our sympathies are encouraged to all ordinary people involved - whether they are German or Russian, civilian or soldier, young or old. Every school child and young person should be shown this film without delay.

I found out about this movie from an article in one of the notorious Russian tabloids. The article was oozing bile condemning "traitors" from the Ministry of Culture who gave 50 million rubles to the triumvirate of producers from Germany, Russia and Ukraine. The author claimed that the film was a pack of lies and that it insulted the "true patriots" and so on and so forth. After the article came the readers' comments and it is an easy guess what the tone of the majority of those was... I felt very sad because I had to admit that the Soviet and, later, Russian propaganda works, and works splendidly. The people have completely lost the ability to think for themselves, to look for alternative information, and to analyze it. They won't even listen to the truth roared directly into their ears. The avalanche of truth that came down on them in the beginning of perestroyka only made them cover their ears and pretend that nothing had happened in the history that could have overturned their little cozy cabin made of lies and self-deception. And the point is not even that the story behind the movie is true or false, it might well be both, but that the audience is not prepared to accept ANYTHING but the depiction of the glorious red army soldiers saving desperate children and housewives from the murderous hands of the Nazis. That they did, of course, no doubt about it, but there was other truth as well, and mountains of it... 4 Tage im Mai tries to uncover just a little bit of that truth hidden beneath a heavy pack of glossy posters of inculpable red army liberators. But any grown man should be wise enough to understand that the world and all that's in it is not just black and white, and the human history has been demonstrating this since its beginning. Watch this movie and decide for yourself if you want to believe it, but don't fail to understand that it is about hard reconciliation and toilsome forgiveness, and that's why it is not inviting to pick sides. Once my granddad's sister, an ethnic German who was born in Russia (and paid for it), told me a story. Her downstairs neighbor, a decorated war veteran, came to her apartment drunk and in tears and confessed that during the war he had never pointed his rifle at any nazi, but had killed tens of his fellow soldiers who tried to flee from the battlefield, overwhelmed by the superior enemy numbers. He served in SMERSH. I wish the director of this movie would make a film about that.