The Twelve Months (1972 film)
1973 film by Anatoliy Granik
The Twelve Months (Russian: Двенадцать месяцев, romanized: Dvenadtsat mesyatsev) is a 1973 Soviet Lenfilm fantasy film directed by Anatoliy Granik based on the play by Samuil Marshak adapted from the fairy tale with the same name.
Plot
Episode 1
An orphaned young girl lives with her indifferent stepmother, who treats her like a servant, and her spoiled stepsister. On New Year's Eve, the stepmother and stepsister send the girl into the forest to gather firewood. While in the woods, strange things begin to happen—animals start talking and playing like humans. A kind old soldier, whom the girl had befriended earlier, explains that miracles often occur on this day. He shares a family tale of his ancestor meeting the Twelve Months during a New Year's celebration.
Meanwhile, the country's queen—a selfish teenage girl who also lost her parents as a child—comes up with a whimsical demand: a basket of fresh snowdrops as a New Year's gift. She promises a basket of gold to whoever fulfills this request, despite her elderly professor's protests about the impossibility of finding snowdrops in winter. The stepmother and stepsister, enticed by the reward, care little about the seasonality of the flowers and decide to send the girl on the impossible task.
Struggling in the freezing cold, the girl eventually resigns herself to her fate, prepared to die in the forest.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Twelve Months (1972 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.