Ballad of a Soldier

“From the very pages of life itself!”

A young soldier is handed six days of leave for a single act of courage on the battlefield, and the trip home to his mother should take hardly any of them. Alyosha Skvortsov (Vladimir Ivashov) keeps getting pulled off the road by strangers who need a hand, among them Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko), a girl he meets on a crowded train. Grigoriy Chukhray films the war-torn country through the windows of Alyosha's slow journey, never leaving the front far from view.