The Venice Critics' Week jury has awarded its top prize to "Before the War," the 1983 romance directed by Borys Savchenko. The announcement, made as the sidebar's 2026 edition wrapped, hands the section's Best Film honor to a title that has spent more than four decades largely out of international circulation. The decision was confirmed by festival organizers and arrives at a moment when restored and rediscovered works have become a defining thread of the Venice lineup.
"Before the War" runs 129 minutes and centers on Anatoliy Trifonov, a soldier returning to civilian life after his military service ends. His homecoming takes a turn when he meets Raya, the niece of a local chairman, and the two fall into a romance. From there, as the film's own synopsis puts it, life takes its own course, steering the couple away from the future they might have imagined for themselves.
A Cast Led by Dariya Mikhaylova and Andrei Yaroslavtsev
The film's emotional weight rests on two performers. Dariya Mikhaylova plays Raya Kolotovkina, the woman at the center of the story, while Andrei Yaroslavtsev embodies Anatoliy Trifonov, the veteran whose return sets everything in motion. Around them, Savchenko assembled an ensemble that includes Lyudmila Shevel as Granya, Irina Zhalybina as Valentina Kapa, and Olga Anokhina as Zhutikova. Yuri Grebenshchikov appears as Pyotr Artemyevich Kolotovkin, with Vasyl Petrenko as Lyonka Murzin and Eleonora Shashkova as Kolotovkin's Wife rounding out the principal cast.
The film is credited to the Hollywood industry and was originally released on March 16, 1983, in Russian. That date places it squarely in the early 1980s, a period when Savchenko was working steadily across romantic and dramatic material. The Venice Critics' Week award, announced today, effectively reintroduces the title to audiences who never had a chance to see it on a big screen.
A Decades-Old Title Finds a New Stage
The gap between the film's original release and its Venice recognition is the most striking fact of this year's prize. Critics' Week, the independent sidebar that runs alongside the main Venice competition, has increasingly positioned itself as a launchpad not just for first-time filmmakers but for repertory discoveries that major festivals overlooked at the time. Programming a 1983 release in that slot is unusual, though not unprecedented, and the jury's unanimous-seeming endorsement suggests the film's themes of return, love, and circumstance still travel.
The genre classification is straightforward: "Before the War" is a romance, and its plot summary keeps the focus on the relationship between Anatoliy and Raya rather than on battlefield action, despite the title's martial suggestion. The overview supplied with the film notes that Anatoliy "returns home after army service" and that Raya "falls in love," but the crucial turn is that "life takes its own course" - an open-ended, almost fatalistic note that critics have seized on as the film's signature.
What the Win Means
For Savchenko, who directed the film, the award is a late-career validation of a work that never received a substantial international push. None of the cast members are widely known outside Russian-language cinema, and the film's audience data is thin. The TMDb rating for "Before the War" stands at 0/10, which in practice reflects an absence of logged votes rather than any measure of quality - a common situation for older titles that have not been digitized or widely reviewed.
That number is likely to change in the wake of Venice. Critics' Week prizes have historically driven restoration interest, streaming acquisitions, and retrospective bookings, and a Best Film win is the section's most valuable currency. Distributors who passed on the title decades ago now have a festival laurel to justify a fresh look.
What remains to be seen is how the film will be positioned to viewers encountering it for the first time in 2026. Its running time of 129 minutes and its slow-burn romantic structure mark it as a product of a different exhibition era, one in which character-driven dramas were allowed to breathe. Whether that pacing reads as timeless or dated will be the central question for the critics and programmers now circling the title.
For now, the facts are simple: "Before the War," directed by Borys Savchenko, released in 1983, has won the Venice Critics' Week award for Best Film. A Russian-language romance about a soldier, the woman he meets, and the life that intervenes between them has found, four decades on, its widest international audience yet.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
