Love and war, a courageous sacrifice on the front, the torment of waiting for a loved one, and a girl suffering the agony of remorse for a perceived failure. These dramatic and emotionally powerful motifs form the basis for The Cranes Are Flying, which went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958. The film disrupted the schematism of Soviet cinema: instead of clichés and the pathos of heroic themes, it offered close scrutiny of one of the many relationships tainted by war while, at the same time, the director allowed himself significant space to draw out the subjective experiences of his protagonists. Together with distinguished cameraman Sergey Urusevsky, he returned to the legacy of the Soviet avant-garde, telling his story using a purely cinematic idiom with special emphasis on elegant visual composition.