Forest Brothers (2014)

• 67%
• 2014
• Peter Grimm
• Juris Bergmanis
• Antonija Brasla
• Leon Garkalns

Forest Brothers is a documentary film that recounts an important little-known period after the end of World War Two, when up to 50,000 residents of the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, used their natural forest environment as a refuge and base for staging armed resistance against the occupying Soviet power. That is why people called them "The Forest Brothers". Their actions lasted till the late 1950s/early 1960s. Over a period of more than a decade, most of them perished in this heroic struggle against the occupying Soviet powers. Very few of those forest fighters who survived the long years in prison camps afterwards are themselves able to tell their story today. This film follows four of them. It relates the course of their lives, a story which we in the West have misunderstood, misconstrued, distrusted, and even ignored.