Beyond the Steppes

This film was very well done.

It depicts the fate of a young Polish woman who gets picked up by Soviet police and is whisked away to a forced labor camp in Soviet Russia. Even worse - she is the mother of a baby boy, who goes there with her.

A little history: At the very beginning of the Second World War (1939), Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia both agreed to carve up independent Poland. The Nazis invaded the western part. Many books and films have depicted the horrors of what they did there. Less known is what the Soviets did in the eastern part, which they invaded. It is a fact that many Poles were arrested and deported to the Soviet Union during this time.

This movie shows nothing military; it is not a war movie. The young woman, Nina (played by Polish actress Agnieszka Grochowska), has been scared awake by some men in the darkness of her apartment, telling her to get her things to leave. And from there, she finds herself in a dreary work camp in the middle of nowhere.

The other prisoners in the camp are also women and a few children, all from Poland. They are all doing the best they can to get by. No surprise, the treatment is harsh. The Russian men are constantly shouting at the women to work harder. Nina has an especially difficult job, since she has to care for her young boy. When he falls ill, she has to see if she can find medicine for him.

The location where this film was made was perfect. There is nothing for miles around. The prisoners are all regular people who committed no crime. They just happened to be seized and deported after their country was invaded.

Cliché' trope pablum. This attempted "story" (?) about 1 woman's WW2 experience felt like an irksome and irritating test of patience from start to finish.....to watch. There is no action, outside of a wagon team running a mid-distance horizon with snowy peaks in the background (1 shot, very nice) or maybe another scene of wind blowing across a prairie of knee high grass (another nice landscape shot). The rest of this self-indulgent snooze-fest seemed like discontented women crying every once in awhile, punctuated by very, very long, silent stretches of no dialog at all. I'm sorry but in my opinion, women crying is not even "Acting", or even entertaining, it's just tediously repetitive and tiresome, and boring. I asked myself many times, "Why am I even watching this?.......maybe it will get better?" It does not get better. This is not entertainment. There is no plot being developed, no surprises, there is no humor, no characters becoming transformed. The male characters are almost universally objectified as boorish pigs, and the women.......selfish drama queens all (except 1 elderly Kazakh). Ugh! It's shallow and monotonous to endure, and never goes anywhere. It simply doesn't deliver. The whole directorial attitude reeks of navel-gazing in the American-style pouty feminist-strain, obsessed with its own narcissism.

We see a low budget "labor camp", that produces nothing and women shoveling sand, but we have no idea what they are digging for. We see women trying incompetently to shovel coal from a pile (how did it get there?), like they've never used shovels before. This paints Polish women as weak, incompetent and bitchy, Russian women as uncaring obstructionists, and the DP amateurish. There is heat-wave distortion flickering across many of the interior shots. Nobody seemed hungry/starving or even cold. This lacks a lot that more skillful hands would have made the effort to flesh out. Much could have been done here, and should be done telling the story/stories of the Poles who were deported to labor camps by the Soviets during WW2. This, sadly, falls far short of that. 2 stars is generous. I want my 80 minutes back. This was just poor film-making on many levels. Simply put, it's not "haunting" as the jacket claims, it's just a slow-motion, low-budget, bore, that tries to piggyback on other people's tragedy. ZZZZZZZzzz. But, hey, if that's your thing then this might be for you.

Very little action, unlike some Hollywood blockbusters, but captivating. Atmospheric.