General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Wings (Крылья) (1966 film)

Wings (Крылья, Krylya) is a 1966 Soviet black-and-white drama directed by Larisa Shepitko, in which a decorated Second World War fighter pilot, now a provincial school principal, fails to find a place for herself in peacetime life. It was made at the Mosfilm studio, runs 85 minutes, and stars Maya Bulgakova as the pilot Nadezhda Petrukhina.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / studio	Larisa Shepitko; Mosfilm, USSR, 1966¹
Screenplay	Valentin Ezhov and Natalya Ryazantseva³
Key crew	Cinematography Igor Slabnevich; music Roman Ledenev; art director Ivan Plastinkin; editing Lidia Lysenkova³^•⁴
Format	Black and white, 1.33:1, mono sound, 85 minutes¹^•³
Lead performance	Maya Bulgakova as Nadezhda Petrukhina, a former fighter pilot turned school principal²
Soviet release	Moscow premiere 15 August 1966; about 8 million admissions in the USSR⁵^•⁴
Restoration	Frame-by-frame digital restoration of image and sound by Mosfilm, premiered online 26 April 2024⁶
Standing	#81 in the BFI Sight and Sound 2022 critics' poll; #101 in the Russian Guild of Film Critics' Best Russian Films⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Story

The war has long been over, but for the heroine, a former pilot, only those years held real meaning. Nadezhda Petrukhina experiences a deep estrangement from everyday reality and has lost contact with her daughter Tanya; she cannot adapt to peaceful, ordinary life, and her acute desire to fly never fades.¹ The American Film Institute's synopsis, drawn from the Criterion Collection, describes her as a once-heroic fighter pilot now living a quiet, disappointingly ordinary life as a school principal.² IMDb summarizes her predicament as a struggle to adapt to peacetime after internalizing military ideals of service and obedience.⁹

Ordinary events deepen her crisis: an attempt to set a troubled teenager on the right path and meeting her daughter's fiancé, while she cannot forget her wartime exploits and dreams of returning to the sky.⁶ In one episode she decides to take a plane from a DOSAAF flying club, an act the film essayist Anna Filippova reads as the front-line pilot who never fit into civilian life acting on that rupture.¹⁰ Flashbacks with aerial photography contrast the sky with the ground, everyday concerns with the thirst for a feat, in what one Kinopoisk reviewer calls an existential search for something beyond material interests.¹¹

Production and script history

For her first feature after graduating from the All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK), the Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko cast the Russian character actress Maya Bulgakova; with Wings Shepitko announced herself as an important new voice in Soviet cinema.² Mosfilm's own listing calls it her second full-length picture.⁶

The script went through several titles. Film scholar Eugénie Zvonkine records that the first publication of the script, in the journal Iskusstvo kino, appeared as "The Tale of a Pilot" (Povest' o letchitse), that other titles such as "Guards Captain" (Gvardii kapitan) were used, and that the final title, Wings, was chosen last. The script by Valentin Ezhov and Natalya Ryazantseva differs substantially from the finished film while foreshadowing some of its important traits; Shepitko introduced the character of a young journalist, absent from the original script by Ryazantseva.¹²

Release and reception

The film premiered in Moscow on 15 August 1966, and Kinopoisk lists a world premiere of 10 November 1966; it drew about 8 million viewers in the USSR.⁵^•⁴ A survey of how Soviet cinema depicted women returning from the front places Wings among films that were shelved or ran "second screen", the Soviet term for very limited distribution.¹³ When Shepitko brought the film to Paris in 1965, the local press received it with admiration, according to a memoir account of the director.¹⁴ A 1988 issue of Sovetsky ekran recalls that when Wings appeared it provoked large disputes, being unexpected and turning the theme of the war generation in an entirely new way.¹⁵

Later standing has been high. The film ranks #81 in the BFI Sight and Sound Top Ten poll of 2022, with 11 votes, and #101 in the Russian Guild of Film Critics' Best Russian Films list.⁷^•⁸ It was released on DVD in the Criterion Collection's Eclipse Series 11 box set devoted to Shepitko.³ Contemporary critics read it as a film about a female war veteran that deals with hidden PTSD, loneliness, and isolation in the post-war atmosphere; Rotten Tomatoes records an 83% Tomatometer score from three reviews.¹⁶ Audience ratings remain solid: 7.7 on Kinopoisk from about 6,000 votes and 7.5 on IMDb.⁴^•⁹

Place in Shepitko's career and Thaw cinema

Scholarship treats Wings as a key work of the cinematic Thaw, the period of relative artistic liberalization in Soviet film. Olena Dmytryk's study in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema examines the film's cinematic sensibility, alongside Dinara Asanova's Rudolfio (1966), within the context of Thaw cinema and Communist morality, noting that although Khrushchev governed from 1953 to 1964, the cinematic Thaw is believed to extend well beyond the Khrushchev era.¹⁷ A Kinopoisk retrospective review places the film in the mainstream of Thaw-era cinema, citing the vital color of its secondary characters, street shooting, and the looseness and spontaneity of the acting, while noting the tension between that style and the director's tragic worldview.¹¹

The film also stands out for its protagonist. Shepitko was among the first directors of Soviet cinema to place a strong woman at the center of the narrative, a path later taken by Gleb Panfilov in The Beginning and Word for Word, though her approach is not a feminist revision of gender roles; the men around Nadezhda appear as pitiable and selfish figures, shown through pointed detail rather than declaration.¹¹ A 2023 essay on war films about women identifies the fate of the woman at war as a weak link in the Soviet and post-Soviet military-film canon, with Wings as a central example of the heroine inside a post-traumatic space.¹⁸

2024 restoration

Mosfilm specialists carried out a frame-by-frame digital restoration of the film's image and sound, and the restored version premiered online on the studio's official YouTube channel at 19:00 Moscow time on 26 April 2024.⁶ The restoration was performed by the Telecinema and Computer Graphics division of the Mosfilm cinema concern.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026