A young soldier is offered a medal for an act of bravery against enemy tanks. He asks for something else instead: a few days' leave to go home and fix the leaking roof on his mother's house.

BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (1959), directed by Grigoriy Chukhray, follows Alyosha Skvortsov, played by Vladimir Ivashov, as he travels across a country at war trying to reach his mother. The film tells you from the start that he will never come home for good, buried far from his village. The leave is short, the distances enormous, and the journey keeps swallowing the time he has left.

Along the way he meets Shura, played by Zhanna Prokhorenko, a girl hiding aboard the same freight train, and a one-legged veteran afraid to face his wife, among strangers whose small griefs and kindnesses fill the train cars and station platforms of the wartime Soviet Union. Alyosha never fires a shot in anger again. The film has no interest in battle, only in what the war takes from ordinary people waiting at home.

Chukhray, himself a wounded veteran of the war, made the film in the early days of the Thaw after Stalin's death, and it is less a war film than a film set in wartime. Mikhail Ziv's score and the black and white photography by Era Savelyeva and Vladimir Nikolayev give the journey a mythic, aching quality. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.