How The Screenplay Came To Be
An old man came to the office of a regional newspaper in the provincial town of Orel and told the editor-in-chief a story that took place during World War II. From 1943 to 1945 he was a sailor on a torpedo boat that escorted caravans of allied army ships in the northern seas. Once their ship escorted two vessels carrying exiled women and their children who were carried from a small northern island.
Marina Sasina was the journalist who talked to the old man. The story made a strong impression on her and so she set out to write the screenplay for «One War».
Synopsis
The film brings to light an unknown chapter in the history of World War II.
May 8, 1945. Major Maxim Prokhorov of the NKVD, the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs, arrives on a small northern island. There are eleven people there: five young women, five children from ages one to three, and a guard, Captain Karp Nichiporuk.
The young mothers, each with her own tragic story, had been exiled to the island from territories occupied by the German Army along with their children who were fathered by German soldiers.
The arrival of the major interrupts the casual life on the island. The major has to “clean up” the island and the nearest settlements. The Russian military authorities have planned the establishment of a training camp for saboteurs, and the island will be erased from the maps. In the morning a boat will come to take the mothers and their children away.
On May 9, 1945, when the women learn about the German capitulation, their hopes for forgiveness and their return home becomes a certainty. They are even allowed to celebrate the Victory. Only the major and the guard know that the next morning the boat will not be taking the women home, but rather away to labor camps, and their children will be placed into orphanages.