Anniversary of The Orphans (Wounded Game)
On June 20, 1977, one of my favorite films of my student youth, "The Orphans (Wounded Game)", was released for wide release in the USSR.
The director of the film "The Orphans (Wounded Game)", as well as the author of the script, was the wonderful Soviet actor and director Nikolai Gubenko. This is not to say that the film has become completely autobiographical. But in many ways the fate of the main character of the picture - Alyosha Bartenev - coincided with the fate of Gubenko himself: the death of his parents during the war, the loss of brothers and sisters, the orphanage ...
Three weeks before the release of Nikolai Gubenko's film "The Orphans (Wounded Game)" it took part in the Cannes International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the main prize - the Palme d'Or. The jury of the film festival, chaired by Roberto Rossellini, awarded its main prize to the Italian film by the Taviani brothers "Padre Padrone (My Father My Master)". The company of "relative losers" to the film by Nikolai Gubenko was Ettore Scola's masterpiece "Una giornata particolare (A Special Day)" with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in the lead roles.
And a little later, in October 1977, Gubenko's film was presented in the program of the International Film Festival in Chicago. Moreover, the film "The Orphans (Wounded Game)" was not the only one that represented Soviet cinema at this film forum. In addition to it, the films "Dersu Uzala" by Akira Kurosawa and "The Ascent" by Larisa Shepitko were also presented. But all three were left without any awards. The awards went to the Greek film "The Hunters" by Theo Angelopoulos (Gold Hugo) and the Cuban film "La última cena (The Last Supper)" by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Special Jury Prize).
The film "The Orphans (Wounded Game)" in the USSR in the first year of the demonstration was watched by 20.3 million moviegoers. According to this indicator, the picture of N. Gubenko took 7th place among the leaders of the Soviet film distribution in 1977.
But, if we focus on the assessments of modern moviegoers, exhibited on the IMDB and Kinopoisk sites, then the film by Nikolai Gubenko "The Orphans (Wounded Game)" over the past forty-odd years has bypassed at least five of its competitors in the 1977 film distribution. 72% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this film from 8 to 10. And 25%, one in four (!), rated the film with the highest score - "ten".
Given the above, the rating of the film by Nikolai Gubenko "The Orphans (Wounded Game)" according to FilmGourmand was 8.132, which allowed it to take 558th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
