Osînda

Opening with an arresting WWI trench battle, this details the return of soldier Manlache Preda to his village in Romania, where he finds his land had been possessed and his wife hasn't waited for him. It follows his subsequent relationship with the local squire - for the murder of whose uncle, in the 1907 peasant uprising, Preda had received a 10-year prison sentence - and his romantic attachment to the attractive, independent daughter of a fellow prisoner. It's competently directed and well shot, and many of its sequences, especially those involving the varied rural landscape, have an epic proportion. The melodramatic and eventually tragic adventures of the honourable peasant take on greater and greater symbolic significance.