Voted most popular film at this year's Sydney Film Festival, Prisoner of the Mountains has everything you could want from what used to be called "arthouse cinema". It's exotic yet familiar, enlightening yet confirming - the stuff myths are made of. Set in a village in the Caucasus during Russia's war with Chechnya, it looks as if it's taking place on the surface of the moon, but after the first 15 minutes, you're feeling so thoroughly at home that the village patriarch starts to assume the glamour of a Muslim Sean Connery.
The film's anti-war sentiments have gone down well in both East and West. In Russia it was a box-office hit praised by, of all people, Boris Yeltsin; in Cannes, it won the Critics' Prize and the Audience Award; and in Hollywood, it was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar.
Its director, Sergei Bodrov, is just as well travelled. As a film-maker in Russia under Brezhnev, he grappled with state censorship; as a film-maker in America, he learnt to negotiate the pitfalls of the independent film-making circuit. No wonder he was able to come up with a war film with universal appeal. His starting point was Tolstoy's Prisoner of the Caucasus -although, in the process of updating the story, he's replaced Tolstoy's pro-Russian perspective with a thoroughly modern even-handedness. In this version circumstances dictate, while human beings, whatever their politics, struggle to do the best they can. The story centres on two Russian soldiers kidnapped and held to ransom by a Chechen village chieftain, Abdoul-Mourat (Djemal Sikharilidze), whose own son is being held by the Russian garrison in the nearby town. Vania, the younger of the soldiers (the director's son, Sergei Bodrov jnr, doing extraordinarily well in his first job as an actor), is a reluctant conscript new to the army; his companion, Sacha, is a career soldier and enthusiastic killer.
Chained together, these two have as little love for one another as for their captors, and their predicament looks at first like a set-up for a Caucasian buddy picture. Arrogant, volatile and charming when he wants to be, Oleg Menshikov - the charismatic actor from Burnt by the Sun - puts such energy into shaping Sacha as a character you love to hate that involvement is guaranteed. You know he's going to win over Vania eventually - and you with him. The surprise comes in his managing to do it without sacrificing the integrity of an abrasive, mercurial performance. He and Bodrov set up the buddy cliche only to twist it in unexpected and tricky ways - a pattern repeated throughout the film. Vania's mother, for example, comes to Abdoul-Mourat to plead for her son's life - a development which is flagged so far in advance that you're primed for a scene in which two basically wellmeaning people in the same predicament bond over their shared sorrow. But Bodrov is much tougher than Hollywood would have been in dealing with the situation. His characters are too desperate to behave as you'd like them to.
Meanwhile, the village and its routines draw you deeper into the lives of those who make their homes in what looks at first like a cluster of shells on a rock. The colours are the greys and golds of stone and straw, set off by the black of the villagers' clothes, highlighted with a touch of red or blue in the headscarves of the women, then given a light-filled, almost liquid, beauty by the crispness of deep-focus cinematography. Bodrov found his locations in Dagestan, a few hundred kilometres from the Chechen war zone, where life imitated art - and provided a good story for the press kit - when a troupe of local wrestlers, hired to double as security guards, took the crew hostage during a pay dispute. There were no hard feelings, it seems, for the wrestlers appear in a scene which, ironically, is the only self-consciously "ethnic" one in the film.
The rest rings powerfully true, resonating with bitter humour at the random illogicalities of war and a poignant concern for those who try, with individual acts of goodness and commonsense, to stand against them.

Submitted by Anni Nikolova