Afghan Breakdown

Afghan Breakdown (Афганский излом)
Directed by	Vladimir Bortko
Produced by	Aleksandr Golutva
Written by	Leonid Bogachuk Aleksandr Chervinsky Mikhail Leshchinsky Ada Petrova
Starring	Michele Placido (Russian voice by Oleg Yankovsky) Mikhail Zhygalov Aleksei Serebryakov Yuri Kuznetsov Tatyana Dogileva
Music by	Vladimir Dashkevich
Cinematography	Valeri Fedosov Pavel Zasyadko
Editing by	Mauro Bonanni
Studio	Lenfilm
Release date(s)	1990
Running time	140 minutes
Country	Soviet Union  Italy
Language	Russian, Italian

Afghan Breakdown (Russian: Афганский излом, translit. Afganskiy Izlom) is a 1990 war drama film about the Soviet war in Afghanistan directed by Vladimir Bortko and co-produced by Italy and the Soviet Union (Lenfilm). Michele Placido, an Italian TV star popular in the USSR, plays the main protagonist, Major Bandura, a commander of a unit of Soviet paratroopers, co-starring with several popular Soviet actors.

The movie is still regarded by most veterans as the best account of the war, despite new box-office hits coming out like 9th Company^[1]. Vladimir Bortko visited Kabul and Kandahar in 1988 to research on the ground.

Plot

The events unfold just before the start of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988. Lieutenant Steklov, son of a high ranking military general is assigned to Afghanistan, hoping to take part in combat and earn some medals before the war ends. Sgt. Arsionov (Aleksei Serebryakov) combines his combat experience and bravery with brutal hazing of young conscripts back in the barracks. Major Bandura's tour of duty has expired. He is free to go home and reunite with his wife whom he has almost forgot. This means leaving his mistress Katya (Tatyana Dogileva), a nurse in base's hospital - to a much anticipation from Bandura's commander Leonid (Mikhail Zhygalov) who fell in love with Katya. All this leads to a chain of events in both combat and the paratroopers' private life on a base. Bandura decides to stay with his men to lead yet another mission in a remote village. The mission turns into the unit's extermination and subsequent massacre of the village by Soviet retaliatory airstrike.

References

See also

• The 9th Company
• The Beast

External links

• Afghan Breakdown at the Internet Movie Database
• Afghan Breakdown at AllRovi

This article related to Soviet film is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This article related to an Italian film of the 1990s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e