The Cranes are Flying

Found this amazing masterpiece of a cinema shot via Weird History.  How did they choreograph those last few seconds when the actress runs among the rumbling tanks?  It's a scene from The Cranes Are Flying, a 1957 Soviet film made during the brief late 50s-early 60s "thaw" under Premier Nikita Khrushchev.  Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov and starring Tatyana Samoilova, The Cranes Are Flying was the first Soviet film to openly address the impact on people, both combatants and non-combatants, of the Second World War.  It would have been impossible to make under Stalin, who died in 1953 and had ordered crippled veterans removed from the streets of Moscow after the war because he thought they presented a poor image.

The film won the Palme d'Or for best film at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, the only Soviet film to ever do so.  Hollywood reached out to Samoilova but she was forbidden by the regime to do Western films.

Here is more from the film.  I need to watch it.