Trivia

This film was commissioned by Soviet Television for VGIK students to make a film to be aired on Victory Day, the anniversary of the Capitulation of Nazi Germany in WWII, May 9, 1959. It was aired each year on this day for at least 4 years beginning with the initial 1959 broadcast. The film was made by several students at VGIK, including Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as a few professional actors and local residents of the town of Kursk, and the Soviet Army supplied props and extras. It was filmed in Kursk between October 1958 and January 1959 and edited at VGIK between January and April 1959. The film was lost after it stopped being broadcast in the 1960s, but the camera negatives were discovered in the mid-1990s.

This is Andrei Tarkovsky's second student film while he was studying at VGIK.

This was a propaganda film, intended to be aired on television each year on the anniversary day of the Soviet victory over the Germans in WWII.

Co-filmmaker Aleksandr Gordon: "VGIK proposed that we make a practice-film intended for TV audiences, a propaganda piece on the victory of the USSR over the Germans... And we just made an easy, uncomplicated script. We did not set out to do a masterpiece, our focus was on learning the elementaries of filmmaking, through making a film that was relatively uncomplicated and also easy for the people to consume. Andrei [Tarkovsky] was happy with this. He had no problems with this approach."

The plot is based on real events that took place in Kursk and described by Arkady Sakhnin in the essay "Echo of War."