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The Taras Family (1945)

The Taras Family (1945)

Drama War
Release Date: 1945, October 15
Directors: Mark Donskoy
Countries: Soviet Union
Production: Dovzhenko Film Studios
Cast: Hans Klering, Venyamin Zuskin, Aleksandra Denisova, Daniil Sagal, Dmytro Kapka, Yunona Yakovchenko, Ivan Kononenko-Kozelskyi, Viktor Khalatov, Mikhail Troyanovsky, Sergei Troitsky, Yevgeni Ponomarenko, Amvrosii Buchma

Overview:

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.