A young couple wander through Moscow before dawn. The streets are almost empty, the city seems to belong entirely to them, and cranes fly high above as Boris and Veronika imagine a future that still appears wonderfully open. Within hours, Germany will invade the Soviet Union, Boris will volunteer for the army, and the private world they share will begin to disappear.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, released in 1957, is one of the great films about war precisely because it spends so little time celebrating warfare. Battles happen, soldiers die, cities are bombed, and families are destroyed, but Kalatozov keeps returning to the people forced to live through those events. At the center is Veronika, played with extraordinary emotional intensity by Tatiana Samoilova, whose wartime experience becomes a story of love, trauma, guilt, survival, and the painful possibility of beginning again.
With cinematography by Sergei Urusevsky, a screenplay by Viktor Rozov, music by Mieczysław Weinberg, and Alexei Batalov opposite Samoilova as Boris, The Cranes Are Flying combined intimate human drama with some of the most adventurous camera work in postwar cinema. It became an international sensation and won the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.
More than six decades later, its images still feel astonishingly alive.
🕊️ Boris & Veronika Before the War
The film begins in happiness.
Boris and Veronika are young, playful, and unmistakably in love. They wander beside the river while the rest of Moscow sleeps, look toward the sky, race through streets and stairways, and tease one another with the easy confidence of two people who assume time is on their side.
Kalatozov allows these early scenes to breathe because their happiness will become the emotional foundation of everything that follows. We need to understand what the war destroys before we can fully understand the loss.
There is already tremendous visual energy. The camera looks down from above, rises from below, follows characters through streets, and races up staircases. Moscow seems open and full of possibility, while the cranes flying overhead become associated with a moment when the future remains unwritten.
Then history intrudes.
⚔️ June 22, 1941
The story begins on the morning Germany invades the Soviet Union.
Boris quickly decides to volunteer for military service. His choice reflects the sense of duty expected of a young Soviet man, but the film does something unusual with that familiar situation. Rather than turning the departure into a simple patriotic celebration, Kalatozov concentrates on the anxiety surrounding it.
Boris worries about telling Veronika.
His father, Fyodor, is upset.
The family understands immediately that volunteering may mean Boris never comes home.
When representatives from Boris’s workplace arrive with ceremonial words about duty and sacrifice, Fyodor impatiently interrupts their clichés. The moment is small, but it signals the film’s larger approach. Public slogans will not be allowed to erase private fear.
War may be discussed in heroic terms.
The people actually living through it are terrified.
🚶 The Farewell Boris Never Gets
One of the film’s most remarkable sequences occurs when Veronika tries desperately to reach Boris before he leaves for the front.
Crowds surround the departing soldiers. Families are searching for sons, husbands, brothers, and friends. Tanks move through the streets while Veronika pushes through the mass of people hoping for one final moment with Boris.
Sergei Urusevsky’s camera follows her with extraordinary freedom.
It moves with Veronika through the crowd, crosses the street among military vehicles, and then suddenly rises high above the scene. An intimate search becomes part of an enormous historical event.
That transformation captures something essential about the film.
One person’s heartbreak is taking place among thousands of other heartbreaks.
Veronika cannot reach Boris.
There is no perfect final embrace.
The war simply carries him away.
🎥 Sergei Urusevsky’s Restless Camera
The cinematography of The Cranes Are Flying is so visually daring that it can be difficult to believe the film was made in the 1950s.
Urusevsky had worked as a wartime cameraman and developed an unusually physical approach to filmmaking. The camera rarely behaves like a detached observer. It runs, climbs, tilts, swirls, races alongside characters, and sometimes seems to experience the same panic or exhilaration they do.
Kalatozov and Urusevsky had already collaborated before The Cranes Are Flying, but here their partnership reached another level.
The camera follows emotional states rather than simply documenting action.
When Veronika runs, the camera seems to run.
When Boris becomes disoriented, the image becomes disoriented.
When someone experiences shock, the physical world appears to fracture along with them.
The technique is virtuosic, but it is rarely empty spectacle. Movement becomes psychology.
🏚️ The Bombing of Moscow
War reaches Veronika not only through Boris’s absence but directly through the destruction of her home.
During an air raid, her neighborhood is bombed. When she returns, Kalatozov delays the revelation until Veronika herself sees what has happened.
The camera races with her toward the apartment.
Then the space opens into devastation.
Where rooms, furniture, family objects, and familiar walls should exist, there is rubble and empty sky.
The loss is almost impossible to process because the physical structure that contained Veronika’s previous life has vanished. War has not simply killed people somewhere far away. It has torn a hole through the place she called home.
This is one of the reasons The Cranes Are Flying remains so powerful. History is continually translated into personal experience.
A bombing is not simply a military event.
It is coming home and discovering there is no home.
🌩️ Mark & the Air Raid
Veronika eventually stays with Boris’s family, where she is increasingly pursued by his cousin Mark.
Mark represents almost everything Boris does not. Boris volunteers for the front despite the danger, while Mark uses his position and connections to avoid military service. Boris’s relationship with Veronika is warm and respectful. Mark’s attention becomes increasingly coercive.
During another air raid, with explosions outside and shattered glass surrounding them, Mark forces himself on Veronika.
Kalatozov films the sequence elliptically rather than literally. Flashes of light, violent sound, blowing curtains, fractured space, and Veronika’s horrified expression communicate the assault through atmosphere and fragmentation.
The scene is immediately followed by tragedy at the front, linking two devastating experiences without turning either into conventional melodrama.
The war has shattered both Boris and Veronika, although in completely different places.
🌳 Boris Beneath the Birch Trees
Boris’s death is among the most famous sequences in Soviet cinema.
After he is shot, ordinary perception begins to collapse. The camera looks upward through tall birch trees as the branches spin across the sky. The forest becomes dizzying and almost abstract while Boris imagines the wedding with Veronika that will never happen.
The visual transition is heartbreaking because the film gives him, for a few moments, the future that history has taken away.
Veronika appears as a bride.
Family and happiness return.
The trees seem to transform around him.
Then the dream disappears.
Kalatozov refuses to make Boris’s death primarily about military glory. His tragedy is not that a heroic soldier has fallen while serving the state.
His tragedy is that a young man who wanted to live has lost the life he imagined.
👩 Tatiana Samoilova as Veronika
Although Boris establishes the film’s emotional center, The Cranes Are Flying ultimately belongs to Veronika.
Tatiana Samoilova gives the character an unusual physical intensity. Veronika rarely seems composed for long. She runs, turns, collapses, stares, struggles to understand what is happening around her, and sometimes seems to carry emotion through her entire body.
This mattered enormously within the context of Soviet cinema.
Veronika is not presented as an idealized wartime heroine who patiently waits without doubt or weakness. She is traumatized, conflicted, sometimes desperate, and burdened by guilt.
Her choices are not always admirable.
Her suffering does not make her perfectly noble.
That complexity makes her human.
Samoilova allows us to remain with Veronika even when Veronika can barely remain with herself.
💔 Guilt Rather Than Heroism
After her ordeal with Mark, Veronika eventually marries him.
The decision can be difficult to understand if approached as a conventional romantic plot. It makes more sense as part of Veronika’s trauma and self-punishment.
She has not stopped loving Boris.
She does not suddenly discover that Mark is the better man.
Instead, the marriage becomes another expression of the damage already done.
Veronika believes she has somehow betrayed Boris, even though what happened with Mark was not something she freely chose. That guilt consumes her.
The film therefore explores a kind of wartime suffering that heroic narratives frequently ignore. Survival itself can become psychologically complicated. People may blame themselves for events beyond their control, especially when society expects clear categories of loyalty, sacrifice, courage, and betrayal.
The Cranes Are Flying allows those categories to become messy.
Human beings usually are.
🚂 Running Toward the Train
One of the most visually intense moments comes when Veronika, overwhelmed by guilt and despair, runs through the streets toward a railway bridge.
The sequence is almost overwhelming in its movement.
The camera races beside her.
Staircases become diagonals.
Trains thunder below.
The city seems to turn into lines, speed, noise, and panic.
Urusevsky does not merely photograph a woman in emotional crisis.
He makes the physical environment express the crisis with her.
Then something interrupts Veronika’s downward spiral.
A child is in danger.
Her instinct to save him becomes the beginning of another direction.
👦 Borka
The boy Veronika rescues is named Borka, a diminutive form of Boris.
The connection is not subtle, but it does not need to be.
For much of the film, Veronika has been moving inward, trapped inside grief, shame, longing, and uncertainty. Caring for another vulnerable person begins to reconnect her with the world beyond herself.
This does not erase Boris.
Nothing could.
Instead, the child becomes part of the film’s gradual movement away from despair toward responsibility and human connection.
The transformation is important because The Cranes Are Flying does not offer recovery as a sudden emotional revelation.
Veronika does not simply decide to feel better.
She begins living again through action.
👨⚕️ Fyodor & Moral Anger
Boris’s father, Fyodor Ivanovich, is another of the film’s strongest characters.
Played by Vasily Merkuryev, Fyodor is a doctor who continues working through wartime shortages, overcrowding, casualties, displacement, and exhaustion.
He is capable of anger, particularly toward selfishness and hypocrisy.
When the truth about Mark’s draft exemption becomes clear, Fyodor is furious. Mark’s comfortable avoidance of military service becomes even more contemptible because so many other people have sacrificed everything.
Yet Fyodor is not simply a mouthpiece for patriotic judgment.
His anger comes from grief.
He has lost a son.
He sees wounded soldiers every day.
He watches people exploit a catastrophe for personal advantage.
His moral certainty exists inside pain rather than above it.
🎼 Mieczysław Weinberg’s Music
The visual brilliance of The Cranes Are Flying can make it easy to overlook its music.
The score was composed by Mieczysław Weinberg, one of the most remarkable composers working in the Soviet Union during the 20th century.
Weinberg’s music frequently seems to move with Urusevsky’s camera. During moments of excitement, the score can accelerate alongside characters. During sequences of loss and memory, it shifts toward melancholy without simply telling the audience what to feel.
The interaction between music, sound, and movement gives the film much of its extraordinary momentum.
Footsteps matter.
Sirens matter.
Explosions matter.
Crowds matter.
Silence matters.
The film’s emotional world is created by listening as much as looking.
❄️ A Different Kind of Soviet War Film
To understand how unusual The Cranes Are Flying seemed in 1957, it helps to consider the political moment in which it appeared.
Joseph Stalin had died in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality contributed to the period commonly called the Khrushchev Thaw, during which Soviet artists experienced a degree of cultural liberalization.
Cinema began changing.
Stories could focus more closely on individual psychology.
Characters did not need to behave like flawless ideological examples.
War could be remembered through grief, fear, confusion, and damaged relationships rather than exclusively through triumph and patriotic certainty.
The Cranes Are Flying became one of the defining films of that shift.
It does not deny the enormous Soviet sacrifice during World War II.
It makes that sacrifice painfully individual.
🎞️ Viktor Rozov & Forever Alive
The screenplay was written by playwright Viktor Rozov and adapted from his play Forever Alive.
Rozov’s emphasis on young people and moral choices made his work particularly suited to the changing atmosphere of the Thaw.
The film preserves the essential emotional structure of the story while allowing Kalatozov and Urusevsky to transform it through cinema.
A stage play can depend heavily on dialogue and performance.
The film repeatedly allows movement, framing, sound, editing, light, and physical space to express what characters cannot say.
The result is a good example of adaptation becoming transformation.
Rozov supplied the emotional architecture.
Kalatozov turned it into motion.
📷 Black-and-White That Never Feels Static
The film’s black-and-white photography is incredibly rich.
Moscow streets shine.
Faces appear from darkness.
Searchlights cut through night skies.
Broken windows become jagged patterns.
Birch trees spin into abstraction.
Crowds stretch into enormous fields of gray, black, and white.
Urusevsky often uses extreme angles and wide lenses that distort ordinary spaces, making staircases, hallways, streets, and rooms feel emotionally unstable.
The technique anticipates some of the extraordinary visual experiments Kalatozov and Urusevsky would later develop in Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba.
Watching The Cranes Are Flying therefore means witnessing not only an extraordinary story but one of cinema’s great director-cinematographer partnerships discovering just how mobile a camera could become.
🏆 The Palme d’Or at Cannes
In 1958, The Cranes Are Flying traveled to the Cannes Film Festival.
It won the Palme d’Or.
The victory gave the film enormous international visibility and made Kalatozov’s work part of the worldwide conversation about the changing possibilities of Soviet cinema.
The achievement remains historically remarkable. The Cranes Are Flying is the only Soviet film to have won the Palme d’Or.
Its success also introduced international audiences to Tatiana Samoilova and Alexei Batalov while drawing particular attention to Sergei Urusevsky’s cinematography.
Audiences outside the Soviet Union encountered a film that did not fit comfortably with simplified Cold War ideas about Soviet culture.
Its characters were not symbols.
They were people.
🕊️ Why the Cranes Matter
The cranes appear at both the beginning and the end of the film.
At first, they belong to Boris and Veronika’s private world. The birds fly above a Moscow still untouched by the coming war, and their movement suggests freedom, continuity, and possibility.
When they return later, everything has changed.
Boris is gone.
Veronika has survived experiences she could never have imagined during those first morning scenes.
The same image therefore carries an entirely different emotional weight.
The cranes continue flying despite human catastrophe.
Life moves forward even when individual lives have been permanently altered.
The symbol is beautiful because it never needs a single explanation.
The cranes can represent memory, renewal, loss, continuity, peace, or simply the world continuing beyond us.
All of those possibilities can exist together.
💐 Flowers for the Returning Soldiers
The film’s final sequence takes place amid celebration as soldiers return home.
Veronika arrives carrying flowers and still hoping against hope that Boris may somehow appear.
He does not.
The reality she has resisted finally becomes unavoidable.
Yet the ending does not leave her isolated inside that grief.
Instead, Veronika begins distributing the flowers she had brought for Boris among the returning soldiers and the people surrounding them.
The gesture changes the meaning of her private loss.
She cannot restore Boris.
She cannot recover the life they were supposed to have.
But she can rejoin the living.
The final movement is therefore neither simple happiness nor despair. Joy and grief occupy the same crowd.
That emotional complexity gives the ending its extraordinary power.
🎬 Kalatozov & Urusevsky After The Cranes Are Flying
Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevsky continued working together after the film’s international success.
Their next major collaboration, Letter Never Sent from 1959, pushed their dynamic camera work into the Siberian wilderness. Several years later they created I Am Cuba, the 1964 Soviet-Cuban production whose astonishing tracking shots eventually made it one of the most admired feats of cinematography in film history.
The visual language of those later movies can already be seen clearly in The Cranes Are Flying.
The camera is not simply recording.
It is participating.
This makes The Cranes Are Flying an important bridge between different eras of Soviet filmmaking. Its emotional openness belongs to the Thaw, while its extraordinary formal experimentation helped clear space for the visually ambitious cinema that followed.
🎥 A Doorway to Thaw-Era Cinema
For viewers exploring Soviet cinema, The Cranes Are Flying is an excellent doorway into the films of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier would also examine World War II through intimate human experience. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood would place a child’s destroyed inner world at the center of another war story. Marlen Khutsiev and other filmmakers would explore youth, uncertainty, memory, and everyday life in increasingly personal ways.
These movies were very different from one another, but they shared a willingness to return individuals to the center of the frame.
War was no longer simply history written in monuments.
It was something that happened to a particular person.
A mother.
A child.
A soldier.
A young woman waiting for someone who would never return.
🌍 War Without Easy Answers
One reason The Cranes Are Flying remains so accessible is that its central emotions are not dependent upon understanding every detail of Soviet history.
The story is culturally and historically specific, but its grief is immediately recognizable.
War separates people.
News fails to arrive.
Families wait.
Survivors feel guilty.
People behave courageously and selfishly, sometimes within the same community.
Those who return are not the same people who left.
Those who remain at home have endured their own forms of trauma.
The film refuses to divide these experiences neatly into heroes and villains.
Mark may be morally contemptible, but Veronika’s complexity is more important than judging him.
Boris may be brave, but the tragedy is that bravery does not save him.
War produces no tidy emotional arithmetic.
☄️ Why The Cranes Are Flying Still Soars
There are many reasons to remember The Cranes Are Flying.
It is historically important as a landmark of the Khrushchev Thaw.
It won the Palme d’Or.
Tatiana Samoilova gives one of the great performances of postwar European cinema.
Sergei Urusevsky’s cinematography remains breathtaking.
Mieczysław Weinberg’s music gives the images additional emotional force, while Viktor Rozov’s story refuses to reduce wartime experience to patriotic slogans.
But the film survives because all those elements serve something deeply human.
At the beginning, Boris and Veronika look upward and see cranes crossing the sky.
They are young enough to believe their lives are still entirely ahead of them.
By the time the cranes return, history has taken almost everything they imagined.
The birds continue flying anyway.
That final contradiction—grief alongside renewal, absence alongside life—is the heart of the film.
The Cranes Are Flying does not tell us that war makes people heroic.
It shows us that war breaks people, changes them, separates them, and leaves survivors trying to understand what remains.
Then, somehow, life continues.
For Veronika, that does not mean forgetting Boris.
It means carrying him forward.
🔗 Related Articles
- Soviet Film Wednesday: The Ascent
- Soviet Film Wednesday: Solaris
- Soviet Film Wednesday: Enchanted Desna
- The Color of Pomegranates: Surrealism, Poetry & Visual Art
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📚 Sources & Further Reading
- The Criterion Collection — The Cranes Are Flying
- The Criterion Collection — The Cranes Are Flying: A Free Camera
- Festival de Cannes — Palme d’Or: The 1950s
- Festival de Cannes — The Cranes Are Flying, Mikhail Kalatozov
- Festival de Cannes — Cannes and Russia: A Love-Hate Relationship
- British Film Institute — The Cranes Are Flying
- British Film Institute — Great Films About Children in Wartime
