The Deer Hunter

Three young steelworkers from a close Russian American community leave their town for the war in Vietnam, where captivity and a forced game of Russian roulette mark each of them differently. Back home, the wedding, the hunt and the bar that once held them together can no longer contain what has happened, and one friend stays behind, bound to the game.

The film shows war trauma returning as dissociation and the compulsion to repeat, held inside a community's frozen and unspoken mourning. For a therapist it is a long look at how a group carries a wound none of its members can name. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1979.