“Battle for Sevastopol” is a Russian full-length feature film directed by Sergei Mokritsky, filmed in 2015. The film tells the story of the fate of the legendary female sniper of the 25th Chapaev Rifle Division of the Red Army, Hero of the Soviet Union, Lieutenant Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who killed 309 soldiers and officers of the troops of Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War.
The film premiered in cinemas on April 2, 2015, and the television premiere on May 9, 2015 on the Ukrainian channel “ Ukraine ” and the Russian “ Channel One ”. On February 22 and 23, 2016, the premiere of a 4-episode television version of the film took place on Channel One. The release of the film on movie screens was timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.
The script for the film was written by Maxim Budarin, Sergei Mokritsky, Leonid Korin and Maxim Dankevich based on the idea of Yegor Olesov and based on Pavlichenko’s book “Heroic Reality: Defense of Sevastopol 1941-1942. Filming took place in Sevastopol, Balaklava, Kiev, Odessa and Kamenets-Podolsky and took almost a year – from autumn 2013 to July 2014.
An international team worked on the film under the supervision of director Sergei Mokritsky, the New People and Kinorob studios. The film project was presented at a stand representing Ukrainian cinema at international film forums in Cannes, Odessa, Berlin and Toronto.
The filmmakers characterized their work as a psychological biographical film about the tragic fate of a woman in the war. The film reflects the events of 1937-1957.
Plot
The plot of the film is based on real events. The facts mentioned in it are based on the biography of the legendary Soviet female sniper Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko.
The Great Patriotic War found Lyudmila, a graduate student at Kiev State University, doing her diploma practice in Odessa. After short-term sniper courses in the first days of the war, she volunteers to go to the front, becoming a fighter in the 25th Chapaevskaya Rifle Order of Lenin Red Banner Division of the Red Army, and begins her heroic combat path: border battles in the Moldavian SSR – defense of Odessa – defense of Sevastopol. Having won many personal victories in duels with Nazi snipers, becoming a living legend, Lyudmila leaves Sevastopol wounded a few days before its fall.
In addition to the battle scenes, much attention in the plot is paid to the emotional experiences of the characters; the “love line” occupies a prominent place, since the director was very concerned about the topic of women in war.
In 1942, having gone through the trials of war, Lyudmila found herself as part of the Soviet delegation to the United States, where she became friends with the first lady of that country, Eleanor Roosevelt. The slogan of the film, “The Woman Who Changed the Course of History,” recalls the role of the legendary female sniper from the USSR in opening a second front in Europe during the Second World War. During a tour of American cities organized by Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyudmila Pavlichenko uttered her famous words in Chicago :
“I am twenty five years old. At the front, I had already managed to destroy three hundred and nine fascist invaders. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you’ve been hiding behind my back for too long?!”
After the war, she met Eleanor Roosevelt again.
The film in some places strongly diverges from the biography of the real Lyudmila Pavlichenko. So, for example, her father could not bear the surname Pavlichenko, since Lyudmila Belova received it in a short early marriage. Also, for the sake of the spectacularity of the fate of the main love story of the film, the circumstances of the death of Pavlichenko’s second and most beloved husband were changed. In reality, Leonid Kitsenko, without even realizing it, defended his beloved: that day, a couple of minutes before the German mortar attack suddenly began, Kitsenko put his arm around Pavlichenko’s shoulders. As a result, when another mine exploded near the newlyweds, it was Kitsenko who received the largest number of fragments.
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