Tonezh women

The film consists of three short stories about three women of the Belarusian village of Tonezh , burned by Nazi punishers in the winter of 1942.

Tatyana Borovskaya, the only survivor of 296 villagers who had been executed by the Germans, was wounded; she managed to crawl out of the pile of dead bodies, among which were her four children who were shot. Anna Vengura - former partisan. Maria Dubeyko is the mother of ten children.

The painting “Tonezh women”, complete in design and artistic decision, is about the fate of the peasant women from the Polesie village of Tonezh. Three women talk about their lives. The death of children, the salvation of a baby son in the swamps of the partisan region, the love story of an orphan girl to a shepherdess - a film tells about this and everyday life in the village. It is philosophical, it reflected history and modernity, the joy of being without war, under a peaceful sky, the call to protect and value life.

- Contemporary Belarusian cinema, 1985 ^[1]

As the Soviet Screen magazine noted, the film stood out in the director’s work, was remembered among many of his documentary works, and in the absence of an off-screen text or commentary in the film, “specificity imperceptibly crossed the boundaries of something local”. ^[2] It was noted that a significant, interesting documentary fact in itself in the interpretation of the author-artist received a new sound. ^[1] The film continued the theme raised by Yuri Marukhin 's documentary “ Soldiers ” (1974):

The films “Soldiers” and “Tonezh women” stand out from the general series of films about Belarusian widows in a poetic and metaphorical order, in the elegiac intonation of a screen story. Yuri Marukhin and Valery Rybarev spoke with sympathy and love about the post-war loneliness of rural women.

- The Great Patriotic War in the cinema of Belarus, 2010 ^[3]