Telling what happened to a young Polish girl during World War II, let the audience learn about the terrible history that happened in the place of Volhynia.
Volhynia was under the rule of the Poles before World War II, but the majority of the ethnic groups in this place are Ukrainians, and the third type of people are Jews. Before the beginning of World War II, Jews had been discriminated against by people of both ethnic groups. At the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Red Army came and the Poles were exiled. Then the Germans occupied Volhynia, the Poles returned, and the Jews were purged. Later, the Ukrainian Uprising Army (UPA) was established, Ukrainian nationalism rose, and Poles and Jews were indiscriminately slaughtered by Ukrainians.
It should be said that when the Soviet Union or Germany controlled Volhynia, things have become very bad, but the heroine can barely survive. But under the UPA, in the last twenty or thirty minutes of the film, the Ukrainians were incited and the slaughter of all other peoples was horribly brutal.
The former neighbors, friends, villagers, and even husband and wife, who were drinking and chatting together yesterday, went to work in the fields, and today they will kill you with an axe. The beheading, skinning, eye gouging, human torches, and two-horse dismemberment shown at the end of the movie are truly horrific. The point is, you know the movies are fake, but you also know the history is real.
The folk custom of the wedding at the beginning of the movie, cutting off the bride's hair on the threshold to show marriage as a wife, and the traditional game of throwing burning stakes in a circle relay, and later cutting off the woman's head and the little boy's torch on the threshold, All ironic comparisons.
The heroine changed from a young and beautiful girl to a walking corpse with a mental breakdown. Did the heroine survive in the end? One said that her first love, who had finally died, drove a carriage to pick her up, indicating that she was dead. Another understanding was that it was a beautiful fantasy after her mental breakdown. In fact, it doesn't matter anymore. Having encountered so many terrifying things, dying is not a relief.
It's hard to tell who the characters are Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in movies. Slavs all look alike.
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