9th Company
Promotional poster for 9th Company
Directed by	Fyodor Bondarchuk
Written by	Yuri Korotkov
Starring	Fyodor Bondarchuk Aleksei Chadov Mikhail Evlanov
Music by	Dato Evgenidze
Cinematography	Maksim Osadchy
Running time	130 min.
Language	Russian
Budget	$9,500,000
IMDb profile

9th Company (Russian: «9 рота») is a Russian / Finnish film about the Soviet war in Afghanistan released in 2005. The film follows a band of young recruits from a farewell ceremony with friends and family back home, through their often brutal training, up to a bloody battle on a mountain top in Afghanistan against the mujahideen.

The film is based on events which took place in early 1988 during the last large-scale Soviet military operation "Magistral". In the movie, only one soldier from the company survives and the company is said to have been "forgotten" by the military command because of the Soviet withdrawal, where as in reality the 9th company was in constant contact with HQ, was backed by artillery fire and lost only a handful of men. ^{[citation needed]}

The film received a mixed reaction from the veterans of that war, who pointed to a number of inaccuracies, but nevertheless, judging by ticket sales, was embraced by the general public, and even by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was also given the Golden Eagle Award for the Best Feature Film by the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts.

It was directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, the son of classic Soviet film director Sergei Bondarchuk, whose 1959 Destiny of a Man was a landmark in film treatments of World War II and who also shot an Oscar-winning epic, based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace.

Although not the first movie to be made about the Soviet Army's experience in Afghanistan (others included the 1991 classic Afghan Breakdown by Vladimir Bortko), 9th Company was the first attempt by Russian filmmakers to create a big-screen, big-budget movie about that war, comparable to the American Vietnam War movies of the 1980s (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July). The film, made for $9 million with help from the United Kingdom's Shepperton Studios, was released in September, 2005 and became a Russian box office hit, generating $7.7 million in its first five days of release alone, a new domestic record.

External links

• 9th Company at the Internet Movie Database
• Afghanistan War Movie Breaks Russian Box Office Record
• Photo of Fyodor Bondarchuk, the director, and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, watching this film