Negative Space presents Come And See (Idi I Smotri)

Taking its title from the Biblical story of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, the film shows the physical and psychological devastation wrought by Nazi death squads during their occupation of Byelorussia in 1943, when over 600 villages were burned to the ground. One of Soviet cinema's most obdurate talents, Klimov waited nearly a decade for the film to be approved. The result is a film of astonishing candour, with Klimov even casting an inexperienced schoolboy in the central role of a rural teenager who finds himself conscripted into the Soviet Army, before becoming caught up in a nightmarish sequence of events in which moments of tenderness and absurdist humour are shattered by eruptions of extreme violence. With the forests and open plains of Belarus rendered in hallucinatory colours, the result is both brutal and strangely beautiful – at least up until a devastating climax which prefigures the Chapman brothers's version of Hell. As the writer Ales Adamovich, who co-wrote the screenplay with Klimov, explained: "This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war - and as a plea for peace."