Zoya (1944 film)

Zoya (Зоя) is a 1944 Soviet biographical war film directed by Lev Arnshtam. Margarita Aliger’s poem with the same name  which had been published in September 1942 was the inspiration of the film. It was entered into the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.

Plot
The film depicts the short life of a Moscow schoolgirl Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya who at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War became a partisan-infiltrator and was executed by the Germans in November 1941 near Moscow in a village Petrishcheva. She was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

Cast

 * Galina Vodyanitskaya as Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
 * Tamara Altseva as Zoya's Teacher
 * Aleksey Batalov
 * Anatoli Kuznetsov as Boris Fomin
 * Rostislav Plyatt as German Soldier
 * Boris Podgornij as German Officer
 * Vera Popova
 * Boris Poslavsky as Owl
 * Nikolai Ryzhov as Zoya's Father
 * Yekaterina Skvortsova as Zoya as a child (as Katya Skvortsova)
 * Kseniya Tarasova as Zoya's Mother
 * Yekaterina Tarasova as Katya Tarasova
 * Vladimir Volchek as Komsomol Secretary