https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_a_Soldier
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169828/

Description and Commentary

This is a soviet georgian film, considered a masterpiece of World Cinema.

This is a mixture of Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan", however this was filmed in 1964, well ahead of it's time.

The story is set in the Eastern Front of WW 2, between 1942 and 1945, when the Red Army goes on the offensive. The elderly Georgian farmer Giorgi Makharashvili learns that his son, Goderdzi, is wounded and was taken to a hospital. So the old man decides to bring a big pouch of homegrown tobacco, some smoked sausages and liquor to his son.

In the 1940's Soviet Union, people grew tobacco plants in uneven rows with eatable vegetables, because the tobacco would also act as a pesticide, protecting the eatable vegetables, and after the crop you could smoke it. I learned this from an immigrant Ukrainian lady that took care of my mother.

The old peasant arrived too late at the hospital, and decides to re-enlist in the Red Army to try to get close to his son, on the move to Nazi Germany.

He is a simple man, that knows nothing about geopolitics, and stands in front or a soviet tank, to protect a vineyard in an Axis country soil.

The tank crew gets mad and say the vineyards are on a fascist nation.

The old man ends up in the capture of the Reichstag in April of 1945, and he follows the entire soviet campaign. this dramatic film is brilliant by showing the WW2 Eastern Front from an old farmer's perspective.

Official Trailer (restored colorized version, the original was b/w):



Notes about the country Georgia:

The internal name of the country is "Kartvelia", in the Middle Ages, some English dude said it was the land of Saint George and called the country "Georgia", the people of Kartvelia are still pissed to this date.

The original name of the country was "Iberia", as any "georgian" will state. 2500 years ago, before Rome existed, the ancient greeks called that country "Eastern Iberia", and called Portugal and Spain "Western Iberia". Nothing else is known by historians to relate the two regions.

What is interesting is that Georgia managed to preserve it's own unique alphabet system, during 3000 years, not being absorbed into greek, latin, cirilic, arabic or persian.

When I was a teenager in the 1980's, Georgia didn't even exist in my Geography Classes. The World map showed U.S.S.R.