
Russian filmmaker Mark Donskoi, of "The Gorky Trilogy" fame, was responsible for the postwar Soviet drama The Taras Family (originally Nepokorenniye, and also released as Unvanquished and Unconquered). A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kiev. The drama focusses on the travails of a typical Soviet family and on the efforts by the Germans to force the reopening of a local munitions factory. The film is at its most grimly effective in a long sequence wherein the Nazis conduct a search for Jewish escapees, culminating in a horribly graphic re-creation of the slaughter of the Jews at Babi Yar. While Donskoi was critically lambasted for his cinematic "sloppyiness" during this sequence (hand-held camera, rapid cuts etc.), it can now be seen that he was attempting a realistic, documentarylike interpretation of this infamous Nazi atrocity.

as Taras Yatsenko

as Aron Davidovich

as Euphrosyne

as Stepan

as Andrey

as Nazar Ivanovich Omelchenko

as Valya

as German engineer

as Policeman (uncredited)

as Maxim

as Ignat Nesoglasny

as Panas

as Petushkov

as Artist

as German commandant

as German Lieutenant

as Zubatov

as Mariyka

as collective farmer