Mother of the Human

Mother of the Human
Directed by	Leonid Golovnya
Written by	Leonid Nekhoroshev Leonid Golovnya
Produced by	Irina Petrova
Starring	Tamara Syomina
Cinematography	Dmitry Korzhikhin Igor Melnikov
Edited by	Nadezhda Veselovskaya
Music by	Nikolay Skvortsov
Production company	Mosfilm
Release date	1975
Running time	89 min.
Country	Russia
Language	Russian

Mother of the Human (Russian: Матерь человеческая, romanized: Mater chelovecheskaya) is a 1975 Soviet war drama film. Based on the story of the same name (1969) by Vitaly Zakrutkin.

Plot

1942. In a corn field, on the outskirts of her native village devastated by the Nazis, a girl comes to her senses. She spends several days in the open air, and then returns to the ashes. There, memories of her former happy life, of her dead husband and son roll over her like a heavy burden... In one of the barns she discovers a wounded young German soldier, Werner Bracht, whom she tries to get out, but he soon dies anyway. Involuntarily, they have to take care of the household: the four surviving cows require regular milking. It becomes a difficult test for the girl to bury the found Soviet soldier, from whose fingers she was never able to pull out his machine gun.

Weeks and months pass, and Maria (that is the name of the survivor) is still alone in the village. From her behavior it becomes clear that she is pregnant. With the help of the cow, she harvests the rutabaga crop, storing it for the future. Winter is coming. In addition to cows and a dog, Maria's farm includes several sheep and a horse.

One winter day, Maria finds seven frightened children in a haystack: six girls and a boy. She takes them in, warms them up, washes them and feeds them. All of them, in different voices, tell Maria about the horrors of war: hunger, bombing, evacuation. At first there were 18 or 19 children, but only these seven reached Maria alive...

The spring of 1943 came. All the children already call Maria mom. One day they find the burnt remains of Mary's husband and son. The woman buries them with the help of her adopted children. Soon the time comes for Mary to give birth. Having kicked everyone out of the barn, she gives birth to a new life in a haystack, under the attentive and sympathetic gaze of her pets, under the rumble of thunder.

Soon Maria, with a baby in her arms and seven grown children behind, goes out onto the hill to meet the Red Army troops driving the enemy back to the west.

Cast

• Tamara Syomina as Maria
• Valery Kokorev as husband
• Alyosha Zimovnov as son

External links

• Mother of the Human at IMDb