I Am Twenty (1965) on Netflix

NR19652h 45m

Sergey Zhuravlev returns from the army to his Moscow neighborhood. He spends his days with his friends Nikolai Fokin and Slava Kostikov, and at a May Day parade he meets Anya.

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Netflix3.9/5
IMDb7.7/101,814 votes
Rotten TomatoesNot available

Plot summary

Sergey Zhuravlev comes back to Moscow after two years in the army and takes a job at a thermal power station. He shares a communal apartment near Zastava Ilyicha Square with his mother and sister; his father was killed in the Great Patriotic War. Sergey passes his free time with his childhood friends: Nikolai Fokin, who is cheerful, and Slava Kostikov, who is married and has a child. He is looking for a purpose in life.

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about I Am Twenty (1965)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

At a March 1963 speech, Khrushchev personally attacked the film and denounced Marlen Khutsiev and his collaborators for thinking young people ought to decide for themselves how to live, without asking their elders for counsel and help.
I Am Twenty was originally titled Zastava Iliycha, but on completion it was heavily censored, trimmed to half its length, retitled and withheld from release until 1965; a restored three-hour version followed in 1989.
The film began production in 1959, during the Khrushchev thaw's years of unprecedented freedom of speech, but by the time it was finished the thaw was waning and its openly critical view of Stalinism, and its portrait of Soviet youth worrying about money and jobs and listening to Western music, were deemed unacceptable.
The film's look was built from handheld camerawork, heavy location shooting and non-actors, among them foreign exchange students from Ghana and the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and scenes were centred on unstaged events such as a May Day parade, a building demolition and a poetry reading.