Immediately after the end of the Second World War, a group of Soviet soldiers find themselves on the farm of a German family that breeds magnificent pigs. Raschke, the head of the family, seems to be happy about the end of the war and the presence of the victors in his house. In his encounters with the twenty-year-old lieutenant, he proudly emphasizes again and again: “War kaput. We took off our boots and replaced them with shoes. Boots down!” It is only in the second part of the film, when concentration camp witnesses recall what actually happened, that we learn more about the rich farmer's past.
With his haunting film It was in May, Marlen Chuciev also creates a memorial to the victims of fascist atrocities. He frames the feature film with original documents from the Second World War and after its end. He places images of the victorious invasion of Berlin by Soviet troops at the beginning of his anti-war film. And towards the end, with the montage of frozen documentary footage from concentration camps and images of free life in the pulsating world metropolis, he emphasizes that what happened must never happen again.
