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My Private War

My Private War

  • Overview
  • Crew

Status

Released

Release Date

Feb 12, 1990

Runtime

1h 29m

Genres

War, Documentary

User Score

20%

Original Title

Mein Krieg

Production Companies

Känguruh Film GmbH, WDR

Director

Harriet Eder

Description

Late in the 1980s, two documentary film makers found six German men, all in their 60s and 70s, who had been soldiers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1942. Each carried an 8mm camera into battle and they still had their film. "Mein Kreig" alternates between interviews with these older men, now apologetic, philosophical, or defiant about their participation, and the footage they shot. It's chronological: basic training, the train trip East, roof-top vistas of war-torn Warsaw, peasants in Belarus, the downing with carbine volleys of a Russian plane, winter, a holiday at the Black Sea, mud, impassable roads, death, destruction and retreat. "Home, that was the front," one says.