Galina Vodyanitskaya Movies

In this lavish and very romantic Soviet film, told largely through flashbacks, we come upon Toma Alistar as he is pretending to be dead to outwit the Czar's tax collectors. Alistar is a violinist, and like many other performers in his day, he has to earn his money where he can. As a youth, he fell in love with Laika. Upon return to his native Moldova from a tutoring engagement in Germany, he finds that she has married a gypsy and cannot be located. Lovesick, he pays a detective for over 20 years to find her -- to no avail because the detective is swindling him. In the present, the tax collectors are once again trying to collect, and are not fooled by Alistar's pretend-corpse, but this time it is the real thing. This film has an extremely sentimental and rather sweet ending. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Zoya is the inspirational true story of one of Russia's most beloved national heroines. During the Nazi siege of Moscow, a fearless 18-year-old girl named Zoya risked her life as a partisan fighter. Captured by the Germans, Zoya endured unspeakable tortures at the hands of the Gestapo but still refused to betray her comrades. Even on the gallows, Zoya defiantly spoke out against the Nazis and everything they stood for. In a series of flashbacks, this film re-creates not merely Zoya's death, but also her life. Galina Vodiantiskaya plays the title character as an adult, while Katia Skvortsova enacts the younger Zoya. The film's English-language version was prepared by Howard Fast, who was later egregiously blacklisted for his "pro-Red" activities. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi