I only saw this movie once. I was dazzled. Tears came to my eyes when the bells rang at the very end. I couldn't hold them back. Something gave in and I cried like a child. I staggered out of the theater. The snow charged sky lit men's dark path with its exhausted glow. Their brutal and confused actions, their all driving fear, imposed the images, unless it was the other way round, that it was precisely the images that had made this uncertain world possible, in which men, the duration of a movie, struggling against death, choosing abjection or courage, were our kin. If this man, hauled to his death in a cart across the great plains of Belarus,  seems carried away, it's because his face is upside down in the scenery, while the sky, the river and the snow fields fade away, dripping from his head, in the tremors of a hazy dream. This peculiar image, wanted, desired, welcomed by Larissa Chepitko more than anything else, takes this man, wrapped in his heavy coat, towards his fate. Thus inside us, the time of a film, one image after another, what we do not know is assembled. This is where cinema stands. Through the sentient world it projects before our eyes, it lets us feel our own darkness. Then we can in turn, otherwise, elsewhere, be the one who is carried away, and in the returning light, stand up streaming in tears.