"All my life I walked on seeds," recalls the soldier Ivan, setting the elegiac tone for this tribute to the Ukrainian peasants' struggle against the Nazi invaders, recounted year-by-year over the period of the war. Ivan is the ultimate patriotic hero-he is the Ukraine, he saves himself. But Solntseva, in the spirit of Earth, transcends polemics with poetry: just as Dovzhenko persistently interpreted both the Revolution and the war in terms of the Ukraine, so she brings every image, every idea back to the human, the personal. She does so through extraordinary montage sequences and double- and triple-superimpositions. A soldier in silhouette walks on moonlit water; the door of a hut opens to an unknown world of horror; a girl returns from enslavement to find that her soldier boyfriend has become a statue; a love sequence has such an ethereal otherness as to make the Surrealists weep. "That was war," we are told in the end, "this is life." That was life, we might add; this is cinema.