Tomorrow Was the War (1987) on Netflix
In 1940, Iskra Polyakova is the class prefect of class 9b in a small Soviet town. Her classmate Vika Lyuberetskaya reads Sergei Yesenin's poetry, and Iskra questions what she was taught.
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- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.7/101,092 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
The students of class 9b stand on the threshold of adult life in a small Soviet town in 1940. Iskra Polyakova is the class prefect, the daughter of a mother devoted to the party, and the rules she has been taught seem settled to her. At a classmate's birthday party she listens to Vika Lyuberetskaya, whose father Leonid Lyuberetsky is the town's aircraft designer, read Sergei Yesenin's poetry. Iskra likes the verses yet considers Yesenin alien to Soviet culture, and Vika gives her the book and tells her that the poet was not a decadent and that feeling belongs to life. In the days that follow Iskra meets Vika's father and begins to put questions to her mother and to herself, about justice, duty and happiness.
Cast
- Viktor Anikievas Interrogator
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Tomorrow Was the War (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Yuri Kara's graduation film ran into trouble with Goskino after it was finished: the whole state committee was against the picture, and it was released only after Armen Medvedev of the state committee defended it.
- Many Soviet directors had tried and failed to win Goskino's permission to adapt Boris Vasilyev's novella, but Kara got the right to film it from his VGIK teacher Sergei Gerasimov.
- The film began as a planned short, a three-reeler, but when the Gorky Film Studio took an interest shooting continued and it grew into a full-length feature.
- Kara shot in colour only the passages where the students step outside the party's immediate constraints, such as the scenes in Lyuberetsky's apartment and the students' excursion, and the rest of the film in black and white.
- Besides classical compositions by Antonio Vivaldi and original music of the 1930s, the soundtrack uses the song The Sacred War to signal the coming war.
- Because Tomorrow Was the War was made as a student project, many of the actors in the film played their parts for free.
- Tomorrow Was the War was the screen debut of Natalia Negoda, who plays the student Zina; the actress playing her mother, Yelena Molchenko, was actually the same age as Negoda.
