BROTHERHOOD IN THE BITTER COLD (Part 1) — Based on a True WWII Story

This movie is dedicated to my grandfather. The stories here are inspired by what he told us during our childhood, with pauses, with jokes, with names that sometimes changed from one evening to the next. I do not know exactly how much of it was truth and how much was imagination, and I never wanted to find out. In memory of Valics Kálmán (1909–1989) “Some of the characters in this movie are entirely invented or renamed, but the way they walk through the snow belongs only to them.” — PART I — October 1944. As the war collapses, a young soldier is torn from a stolen afternoon of love and marched east. Deep in the frozen vastness of Siberia, a handful of Transylvanian and Romanian prisoners trudge through endless snow, surviving on the only thing the cold cannot take from them — the memory of home: a wife’s goodbye, a daughter’s whistle, a bowl of their mother’s soup. Then a single drop of blood blooms on the white snow, and the cold gives way to a memory one of them can no longer outrun.