You Watched What?

Screen capture from the clip below

So lately I've been watching a lot of foreign films, preferably in the original language (unless I'm really, really tired and can't keep up with the subtitles). The latest film is 1944, an Estonian film about World War II. Specifically Estonia's role in that conflict.

Lest you think this is some high level historical documentary, let's lay that idea to rest immediately -

It's a film about the people most impacted by war - the soldiers who fight the battles and the civilians who get caught up in the midst of battle. This film had a very interesting twist, which I won't spoil by telling you about it, you'll need to watch the film yourself. I will give you a hint - Estonians were caught up on both sides on the Eastern Front. It was a real lose-lose proposition for them.

Estonia is one of those smaller nations which always seems to be caught up in the struggles of the larger powers around her. Usually between nations which speak either German or Russian. World War II was no exception. (The Poles and the Swedes were also prominent in earlier struggles in the Baltic region.)

Estonia is one of three Baltic nations: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. I've always been interested in that area of the world as there was a small community of Lithuanians in my hometown (along with a much larger contingent of Poles). One of my best friends in those days was of Lithuanian descent.

So Estonia (Eesti Vabariik for you purists out there) was, for a century, part of the Russian Empire, the Estonians regained their independence in 1918. For those of you familiar with European history, you might recall that Hitler and Stalin ended Estonian independence in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which cleared the way for the Germans to invade Poland. (And allowed the Russians a "sphere of influence" in the Baltic, not to mention being able to stab Poland in the back some two weeks after the Nazis invaded.)

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Estonia regained her independence in 1991. Estonia joined NATO in 2004, which I'm sure the Russians don't care for.

The Estonians have one of those odd languages in Europe which aren't part of the Indo-European language family, it's most closely related to Finnish. Speaking of language (pun intentional) here's a rather attractive lady explaining Estonian -

(She's from Latvia, though she is a native Russian speaker. She explains this elsewhere on her YouTube channel. What can I say? I'm a sucker for foreign languages ...)

The one disappointment I had with the film (which I watched, with ads, on Amazon Prime via IMDb) was that it was dubbed in English. I would have much preferred it be in the original language with subtitles in English. Ah, but if wishes were horses ...

As an aside, the Russians have a number of fairly good WWII films out, my favorite being T-34, even if it is a bit overblown. Amazon Prime has a bunch of 'em, some really good, others not so much. But hey, it's a break from Hollywood and all that entails.

So that's a new thing, kind of, Sarge as film critic. But mostly war movies. Some Russian films are far too depressing. Which led me to this meme ...

(Source)

Sound familiar? (FWIW, Tolstoy drives me crazy, not in a good way either. Solzhenitsyn is almost as bad.)