Film

Sergei Bodrov, 1996

Based upon a short story by Leo Tolstoy, two Russian soldiers, Sasha and Vanya, are ambushed by Muslim rebels in the Caucasus region of Chechnya and taken prisoner by a Chechen, who wants to trade them for his son in a Russian prison. The two cope with the situation in very different ways, as the war-hardened Sasha works to escape while the young and naive Vanya tries to make friends with his captors. An intricate and tragic sequence of events leads to an ending in which everybody loses.

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