Sergei Bodrov's "Prisoner of the Mountain," the foreign-language Oscar nominee from Russia, is a terse, poetic look at the intimacy of war - when enemies come face to face.

Very small, with only a half dozen major characters, the film was adapted from a 150- year-old Leo Tolstoy short story, "Prisoner of the Caucasus" (the film's title in Russia), and structured like a play.
This is a "war film" with so little action that any burst of activity comes across as something startling.
Mostly, it's conversational and all mood as it emotionally considers the fate of two prisoners of war, men held by a villager.
The villager is Abdoul-Mourat (Jemal Sikharulidze), a Muslim mountain man residing in a hamlet in Chechnya. His own eldest child is a POW, jailed by the Russian invaders. When a company of Russians is ambushed by Chechen rebels, only two survive and they are immediately taken in tow by Abdoul-Mourat, chained together and held hostage at his home.
The man thinks he can work out a deal with the enemy: these two in exchange for his beloved son.
The film concentrates on the humanity on both sides of the fence, which is exactly alike, as well as the way it is distracted by war and replaced by distrust. Much of the movie concentrates on the two prisoners and their own grudging relationship, which starts off tentatively and grows.
Sasha -- the older one, a veteran of many wars and something of a professional warrior -- is given a dashing turn by good, gray Oleg Menshikov, a staple of many Nikita Mikhalkov films. (Menshikov was prominently featured in Mikhalkov's Oscar- winning "Burnt by the Sun.")
The other is much younger, just a boy, a raw recruit named Vania and played by the filmmaker's 20-year-old son, Sergei Bodrov Jr. This is a good season for father-son teams. Another Oscar-nominated foreign-language film this year is like this movie in reverse: "Kolya" has a son directing his father.
The two films also share the same kind of rough-hewn sweetness, with Bodrov balancing it in his movie with steady, measured doses of dread.
On the sidelines of the story for its first half is Abdoul-Mourat's young daughter, Dina (Susanna Mekhralieva), who is about 10 and whose job it is to feed the hated prisoners. As she grows closer to Vania, the film moves slowly away from the prisoners and closer to Dina, until, by its end, we are seeing everything through her, feeling what she feels and sensing her confusion.
Matters get muddier, with the villagers anxious to get the prisoners out of their lives and with the Russian authorities refusing to acknowledge that there even are any hostages.
A well-executed attempted-escape scene adds to the tension, but mostly the film dwells on the day-to-day activities in the isolated, picturesque Caucasus Mountains, among both the villagers and their prisoners. It's a world where everyone is a prisoner and where bonds created by war are maddeningly temporary, bringing an unexpected poignancy to the ordeal of life there.
In addition to its Oscar nomination, "Prisoner of the Mountain" also won the Audience Award and the International Critics Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.

Submitted by Kay