Only a Switch

Marya is the wife of medical student Victor Sablin, who finds it impossible to deal with military life when he is inducted into the Russian army during World War I.

A drama between people under unconventional circumstances. In the Second World War Finland was the only nation who brought casualties killed-in-action back to be buried at home. These actions were carried out by men and women working in assembly centres near enemy lines. Silence is a story of a group of people in a limbo between life and death, and a mental no-man's-land, where Heaven and Hell, horror and joy, love and fear touch each other.

The film is based on real events, focusing on the lives of three young nurses, one of whom undertakes a treacherous journey up the Mekong River to Cambodia to save a very young Vietnamese-American girl before her life is destroyed during the American bombing of Cambodia.

The film opens with the mad rush of haphazard freedom as the concentration camps are liberated. Men are trying to grab food, change clothes, bury the tormentors they find alive. They are then herded into other camps as the Allies try to devise means to control the situation. A young poet, who cannot quite find himself in this new situation, meets a headstrong young Jewish girl who wants him to run off with her to the West. He cannot cope with her growing demands for affection, and still feels hatred for the Germans and disdain for his fellow men, who quickly revert to petty enmities.

Lieutenant Takala joins a group of war veterans who gather in a restaurant to reminisce their unit's operations on the Finnish-Soviet front. A flashback takes us back to summer 1944 where the unit, led by Takala, performs dangerous guerrilla operations behind enemy lines. A subplot alleges sexual liaisons between soldiers and female volunteers, which caused controversy when the film and the novel it's based on were released in the early 1960s.

Is the story of Samantha and Dov Ernst, American Zionists who emigrated to Palestine. Kalkofsky, a German Jew and bookseller, left behind his family in Europe. He accommodates Silvia, a young revolutionary against British rule.