A large-scale adaptation, matching its literary original, of Leo Tolstoy’s famous epic novel.
Over the fifty years of the movie’s existence, more than one generation of Soviet and Russian schoolchildren has written graduation essays on «War and Peace,» drawing their knowledge of the plot not from the thousand-page novel itself, but from its most detailed screen adaptation. The director of the movie, Sergei Bondarchuk, and his team spent around six years filming it—just as long as Tolstoy spent writing the novel. Bondarchuk’s «War and Peace» is one of the most expensive movies in the entire history of world cinema. The authoritative online movie reference IMDb calculated that $100 million was spent on the production, equivalent to a budget of $500–700 million today.
Following the novel, the movie tells the story of the lives of several Moscow noble families during the years 1805–1813, a period encompassing landmark historical events for Russia, the most important of which was the Patriotic War of 1812. The movie’s extraordinary spectacle is enhanced by large-scale battle scenes, studio and panoramic filming carried out in a manner new for those years, using the most modern equipment, as well as magnificent costumes. The movie received numerous prestigious awards, including the «Oscar» for Best Foreign Language Film (1969) and the Grand Prix of the 1965 Moscow International Film Festival.
