While in training as a director at the State Institute of Cinematography, Shukshin was assigned an apprenticeship at the Odessa Studio. Instead of serving as an assistant, director Marlen Khutsiev invited him to play the lead role in The Two Feodors. According to Shukshin, this unexpected coup occurred because he had a "soldier's mug." Regardless, his well-modulated, unaffected performance made him an immediate sensation with Soviet audiences. Shukshin plays "Big Feodor," a much-decorated soldier who returns from the war only to find his home destroyed and his family missing. Adrift, he meets "Young Feodor," an orphaned youngster who has heroically weathered the hardships of the home front. "Big Feodor" becomes the putative father to this young companion and together they set about rebuilding their lives. The irony of this situation is that the boy is in many ways more wise and embittered by the war than the soldier, for it was amid the chaos of invasion that the civilian population suffered untold trials. But as Maya Turovskaya writes: "This meeting of two different generations and different characters created by the war contains the most interesting human observations in the film; the elder Feodor's clear and uncomplicated morality, a worker's morality, gradually straightens out the twisted soul...of the young Feodor." The real success of the film is due in large part to Shukshin's unvarnished peformance: what he lacked in formal technique, he made up for in sheer honesty of character. It is also interesting to note that The Two Feodors was made possible by the advent of de-Stalinization: the intimate handling of contemporary, personal themes in Khutsiev's film had been missing from Soviet film for some twenty years. Please note: tonight's print has no English subtitles.