The Last Train

This film début by the 26-year-old son of the great Russian film maker Alexei German is about a good man who refuses to accept the idea of war: the type of person who is doomed in every war to die without ever firing a single bullet. This war drama, shot in magnificent black and white and similar scope, is inspired by a true family story: the grandmother and mother of German Jr. were saved in the Second World War by a German soldier who disobeyed orders to allow deported prisoners to escape from a train carriage. At another spot, and more or less the same moment, the grandfather of German Jr. was killed by a Nazi bullet. The Last Train is a shocking, and occasionally surrealist, but always human film about German people who were forced to fight; ordinary, intelligent people who died a pointless death. In the winter of 1944, when the German war machine is already going off the rails, Dr Fistchbach arrives on the Eastern Front in a no-man’s-land of icy cold, snow and mist. In the chaos of the Russian counter-attack, he becomes lost between the lines. Together with another soldier, he tries to walk back, away from the front. Coughing, talking, bleeding and gasping for breath, they get lost in the Russian landscape, from one surreal encounter to another.