Sugra ve ogullari

In a remote village in Azerbaijan the children play war games, "for Stalin and the motherland". The adults see it differently: The Muslim population doesn't regard the Bolsheviks' struggle against fascism as their war. Traditionally nothing good has come from Russia nor the Soviet Union, whilst the Nazi terror is geographically far-removed from their everyday existences. The able-bodied men evade military service and hide in the mountains. Together with his mother and older brother Bakhtijar lives a life of poverty. The political commissar harasses the women and even rapes one of them. Bakhtijar's older brother secretly goes to the mountains. One day a police unit comes to the village looking for the hidden men. Employing poetic black-and-white imagery cameraman Ayhan Salar, also the film's German co-producer, sensitively captures the austere landscapes, whilst artfully making reference to classic war films from the 1960s.