Prisoner of the Mountains

Product Description A stunning, emotionally charged indictment of war, this OscarÂ(r) nominee* for Best ForeignLanguage Film is at once 'thoughtful, moving (Roger Ebert), potent, engrossing (Variety),and unexpectedly affecting (The Wall Street Journal)! Two Russian soldiersa fresh recruit named Vanya and a hardened veteran named Sachaare taken hostage by Chechen guerillas after a deadly ambush leaves all of their comrades dead. Their captor, a battle-weary village elder,wants to use them as a bartering tool to get back his own son, held prisoner by the Russian army. But when the trade goes sour and all trust is broken, Vanya and Sacha realize their hours are numbered and attempt to escape before they're forced to join their comrades in death. *1996 Amazon.com There's a beautiful irony in the way that the most specific war tales are often the most universal. Set high in the imposing, isolated Caucasus mountains, where the 20th century meets ancient lifestyles, Sergei Bodrov's drama of the Chechyn war finds two opposing cultures locked in conflict for so long that the reasons seem moot. Young Russian grunt Vanya (Sergei Bodrov Jr., the director's son) and his jaded veteran Sergeant ( Burnt by the Sun's Oleg Menshikov) survive an ambush by Chechyn guerrillas and wind up hostages of a village elder, a war-weary widower who has lost almost everything to fighting and wants merely to swap them for his POW son. Bodrov's humanism is directed with empathy and stirred with harsh realism--he takes no sides and offers no fantasies of happy endings, only small miracles of kindness that refuse to be swallowed in the destruction and mistrust. --Sean Axmaker