A multitude of World War Two movies commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the war continues to fill movie theatres around the world.
The ‘Battle for Sevastopol’ is the latest offering from a Russian-Ukrainian joint venture to tell the story of the renowned female Red Army sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who was nicknamed ‘Lady Death’ and killed over 300 Germans.
The movie was made just before current relations between the two countries took a turn for the worse in 2015. Despite the chilly relations the movie was premiered in both Moscow and in Kiev last week.
The director hopes that it will remind people of the two country’s joint history and may help to bring people together.
The movie is in Russian and tells how Ukrainian-born Lyudmila Pavlichenko became a trained sniper in the Red Army and was dispatched to the frontline in 1941 to fight in Odessa and Sevastopol at the age of just 25. Lyudmila is reported to have killed over 300 Germans during her time on the frontlines.
Yulia Peresild plays the role of Lyudmila in the movie and says that she was a tough lady who was relentless in her mission to kill as many Germans as possible.
The movie also tells the story of how Lyudmila fell in love with a Red Army commander, who was killed in action. She fell in love with another Red Army sniper, but he was also killed.
After months on the frontline, Lyudmila is injured and is evacuated from Sevastopol just before the Nazis took the city, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
At the time the Russians were eager for the Allies to open up the Western front to the war so that there would be reduced pressure from German troops in the east. Stalin sent Lyudmila to the US and Canada as part of a foreign relations tour and for her to lobby for the Western front.
Lyudmila met Eleanor Roosevelt, they became friends and later met again after the war in Moscow.