It's highly rewarding seeing recent films from the German perspective of events, during WW2. This one concerns the hundreds of thousand of captive German soldiers (at the end and after the war),that were shipped to the Russian Gulags and never seen again. This is the true story of just one individual, who managed to escape and then walk across the whole of the country, to the Iranian border (which took him around three years). He was not only chased by an obsessive camp commander but had to endure, walking through Siberia in temperatures dropping to -40 degrees. You could never have made it up (surely he would have perished) and if this real event had been either an American or a British soldier, he would have indeed been World famous and depicted on stamps. It remains one of the finest testaments of human endeavour and the film does him a rightly so heroic justice. Also to the Jewish man who helped him, with just a sheer kindness.

"So weit die Füße tragen" or "As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me" is a German movie from 15 years ago and I am quite surprised how this film is really not known at all in Germany right now. It is probably more known abroad because of the subject. but I will come to that later. The reason for which it may not be too famous is that director Hardy Martins, who started as a stunt coordinator and already worked with Wim Wenders over 20 years ago, never made another movie after this one here. He was also part of a team that adapted the novel for the screen here. The lead actor is Bernhard Bettermann here and he is also not known at all today anymore, mostly acts in television series these days. This is quite a shame as he does a really good job with this movie and is in basically every scene from start to finish and what is even more impressive is that he carries this film for over 150 minutes. He is the main reason why this works pretty well. And the script is too of course.

What I found most interesting is the plot of the film. There are so many German films about World War II, military operations, the Fuehrer, she suffering people, the chanting people etc. but this one here plays with the exception of the first couple minutes when everything is over. We see the protagonist spending time in a Soviet labor camp. The first third of the movie roughly is about the man's attempts to break free. Everything afterward is about how he succeeded, but is still fighting a really rough battle in order to survive and make it back to his family. This family background is the emotional aspect of the movie and this is also where it delivers pretty nicely. So as a whole the film includes really quite a few areas and works well in pretty much all of these: drama, war, survival, romance and history. I recommend this film. Go check it out. It is really impressive how it never dragged despite the massive runtime. Thumbs up.

The real pleasure in this film is the attention to realism of its amazing sets, very likely a real representation of German and Soviet realms of the 1940s through to the 1950s. This enterprise must have had a good budget and clever stage presenters. Although one doesn't imagine one needs a lot of attention to detail in the dire offices of Soviet officialdom, one got the sense that it was there. And of course the cinematography was superb. The characters are a little superficial to my mind, and there is the hint that this movie is becoming dated, but only a hint. It should stand the test of time for all the right reasons, particularly its honest approach to a story, nothing too detailed, nothing too sparse, expressing a real commitment to the script and plot. Nothing much surprises, but the casting and the acting are good, as are the editing and the soundscape, so, like the story, all are in correct proportion. There are some very sweet and original human and emotional touches to this movie that pushes it up a notch. One might like to make a double feature of this movie with The Way Back from 2010. Both are excellent adventures.