Three Comrades

Growing up in the Chechen capital of Grozny, three friends would spend their time listening to Western pop music and dreaming of traveling the world to make films. But when bombs began falling on their city in 1994, the young lives of Ramzan, Ruslan, and Islam took a tragic turn. Ramzan, a television cameraman, was never without the tool of his trade and his archival film serves as the centerpiece of this deeply personal documentary. Illuminating the devastation of the war on Chechnya and her people while still capturing the little joys that life manages to bring in even the worst of circumstances, THREE COMRADES is an extraordinary depiction of wartime existence. Ramzan's footage is intertwined with remarkably poignant interviews with the men's families and with Islam, the only one of the three who managed to survive the war. War is always a tragedy, but in this story of three friends, it is the brevity of their youth, which was by lucky chance captured on film, that is the most heartbreaking casualty of war. (In Chechen and Russian with English subtitles.) –J.B.H.