later wanders out of the scorched village in the direction of the Germans, where he discovers they had been ambushed by the partisans. After recovering his jacket and rifle, Flyora comes across the woman who escaped the church with him in a fugue state, her legs and face covered in blood after having been gang-raped and brutalized by the soldiers. Flyora returns to the village and finds that his fellow partisans have captured eleven of the Germans and their collaborators, including the commander, an SS-Sturmbannführer. While some of the captured men including the commander and main collaborator plead for their lives and deflect blame, a young fanatical officer, an Obersturmführer, is unapologetic and vows they will carry out their genocidal mission. Kosach makes the collaborator douse the Germans with a can of petrol brought there by Flyora, as a runner approaches bearing a torch lit from the burning village, but the disgusted crowd shoots them all before they can be set on fire. As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle and proceeds to shoot it numerous times. As he does so, a montage of clips from Hitler's life play in reverse, but when Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother's lap, Flyora stops shooting and cries. A title card informs: "628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants." Flyora rushes to rejoin his comrades, and they march through the birch woods as snow blankets the ground. Cast Aleksei Kravchenko as Flyora/Florian Gaishun Olga Mironova as Glasha/Glafira Liubomiras Laucevičius as Kosach (voiced by Valery Kravchenko) Vladas Bagdonas as Rubezh Tatyana Shestakova as Flyora's mother Yevgeny Tilicheyev as Gezhel the main collaborator Viktors Lorents as Walter Stein the German commander Jüri Lumiste as the fanatical German officer Production Klimov co-wrote the screenplay with Ales Adamovich, who fought with the Belarusian partisans as a teenager. According to the director's recollections, work on the film began in 1977: For eight years, filming could not begin because the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) would not accept the screenplay, considering it too realistic, calling it propaganda for the "aesthetics of dirtiness" and "naturalism". Alongside this, the death of his wife Larisa Shepitko, also a filmmaker, in 1979 forced him to first complete the work she began on what was to be her next film, Farewell; it would finally be released in 1983. Eventually in