This year marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Come and See (Idi i smotri in Belarusian), a hallucinatory nightmare in which the madness and trauma of war burns inescapably on your retinas. It is one of the best anti-war films ever and a frontal assault on the heroic myths of Soviet propaganda.

Fifteen-year-old Flyora is looking forward to it when he is conscripted by partisans in the Belarusian countryside in 1943. But when he is introduced to the horrors of war, the lustre soon wears off. After straying from his group during combat operations, he tries to find his way back to his native village with a girl.

Come and See lets you not watch, but undergo. No film shows more poignantly how violence dehumanises human beings. Where traditional war films celebrate courage and victory, Soviet and Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov shows a nightmare of chaos, trauma and senseless violence. No heroes, no glory - only the devastating impact on a child.

The film is thus an attack on communist propaganda films because it radically breaks with the heroic and polished image that Soviet cinema traditionally gave of World War II, aka the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Whereas classic Soviet war films emphasise patriotism, courage and victory, Come and See instead shows the horror, confusion and psychological devastation of war - without heroes, without triumph. In doing so, Klimov undermines the ideological foundation of the communist propaganda film: that suffering is meaningful if it is for the motherland. Come and see is therefore not a celebration of sacrifice, but a raw indictment of war itself - and thus of any system that glorifies war.