Movies - 9th Company

Home > Listing Index > Movies > 9th Company

	Movies - 9th Company

9th Company (Russian: «9 рота») is a Russian / Finnish film about the Soviet war in Afghanistan released in 2005. The film follows a band of young recruits from a farewell ceremony with friends and family back home, through their often brutal training, up to a bloody battle on a mountain top in Afghanistan against the mujahideen.

The film is based on events which took place in early 1988 during the last large-scale Soviet military operation "Magistral". In the movie, only one soldier from the company survives and the company is said to have been "forgotten" by the military command because of the Soviet withdrawal, where as in reality the 9th company was in constant contact with HQ, was backed by artillery fire and lost only a handful of men.

The film received a mixed reaction from the veterans of that war, who pointed to a number of inaccuracies, but nevertheless, judging by ticket sales, was embraced by the general public, and even by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was also given the Golden Eagle Award for the Best Feature Film by the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts.

It was directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, the son of classic Soviet film director Sergei Bondarchuk, whose 1959 Destiny of a Man was a landmark in film treatments of World War II and who also shot an Oscar-winning epic, based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace.

Although not the first movie to be made about the Soviet Army's experience in Afghanistan (others included the 1991 classic Afghan Breakdown
by Vladimir Bortko), 9th Company was the first attempt by Russian filmmakers to create a big-screen, big-budget movie about that war, comparible to the American Vietnam War movies of the 1980s (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket
, Born on the Fourth of July
). The film, made for $9 million with help from the United Kingdom's Shepperton Studios, was released in September, 2005 and became a Russian box office hit, generating $7.7 million in its first five days of release alone, a new domestic record.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for 9th Company ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article 9th Company; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay