There have been many films depicting great wartime escapes, from ‘Colditz’ through to ‘The Great Escape’ all referring to British captives.
Now available for the first time on DVD comes a powerful epic featuring a German soldier called Clemens Forell.
A tearful daughter begs her father not to go off to war.
He promises to come back to her mother and her whatever happens.
It is 1944 and the war is the barbaric last stages of the epic battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Empire.
Within six months the Russians are in Berlin with an appetite for revenge.
Part of that exercise was the sentencing of ‘ordinary soldiers’ to hard labour in the notorious Gulags cited in the frozen wastelands of Northern Siberia.
This film tells the true story of how one of these soldiers beats the odds by surviving the horrors of the Gulags and uniquely walking 8000 miles to his freedom and making good his promise to return to his beloved daughter and wife.
A moving and timely undercurrent that runs throughout the story is the belief in and practise of prayer.
The film is full of incident and humanity as we walk all of those weary miles with our hero.
A German language film with intelligent subtitles this is an engrossing and entertaining two and a half hour movie which flies by without a dull moment.
Beautifully filmed and acted this is first class entertainment well up to the current standard of German film making.
War is hell, so to is its aftermath.
This film reminds us that suffering was not the exclusive hardship of one side of the Second World War and that the pain did not end when the guns fell silent in 1945.
As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me (DVD) Cat No 2NDVD3200 Second Sight Films Co.