The Taras Family (1945): cast, story & where to watch

Released in 1945, The Taras Family is a drama and war film directed by Mark Donskoy.

What it’s about. Russian filmmaker Mark Donskoi, of "The Gorky Trilogy" fame, was responsible for the postwar Soviet drama The Taras Family (originally Nepokorenniye, and also released as Unvanquished and Unconquered). A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kiev. The drama focusses on the travails of a typical Soviet family and on the efforts by the Germans to force the reopening of a local munitions factory. The film is at its most grimly effective in a long sequence wherein the Nazis conduct a search for Jewish escapees, culminating in a horribly graphic re-creation of the slaughter of the Jews at Babi Yar. While Donskoi was critically lambasted for his cinematic "sloppyiness" during this sequence (hand-held camera, rapid cuts etc.), it can now be seen that he was attempting a realistic, documentarylike interpretation of this infamous Nazi atrocity.

Who’s in it. The Taras Family stars Mykhailo Vysotskyi as German engineer, Amvrosii Buchma as Taras Yatsenko, Daniil Sagal as Stepan and Yevgeni Ponomarenko as Andrey, among others.

How it landed. With an audience score of 5.5/10, The Taras Family has drawn a solid, mixed-to-positive response.

Where to watch. Streaming options change often. See the full, country-by-country breakdown on our where to watch The Taras Family page.

If you liked it. Fans of The Taras Family tend to enjoy The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, Schindler's List and The Godfather Part II.