In December 2017, a film based on the Soviet Union’s unexpected 1972 Olympic basketball victory over the US became the highest-grossing Russian film ever.
A Russian war film that tells of a Soviet soldier’s “devotion to the motherland”, the latest in a line of state-funded patriotic blockbusters, has broken Russian box office records for its first week on release in the new year.
The government has funded a number of patriotism-promoting pictures in recent years, not just focused on the Soviet war victory.
The director, Aleksey Sidorov, said the aim of his film was to “tell a war story in a way that attracts young people and does not provoke objections from those who still remember the great patriotic war”.