28 panfilovtsev) is a 2016 WWII film based on a legend about a group of soldiers – Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen – heroically halting and destroying German tanks headed for Moscow.

[3] It is set in the Eastern Front of World War II and covers the 8th Guards Rifle Division operations during the 1941 Battle of Moscow.

Initially the film used crowdfunding; later, it was financially supported by Russian and Kazakhstan governments and Gaijin Entertainment game development company.

[6] The plot was written by Andrey Shalopa in 2009, and the production team took their teaser trailer of the film to Boomstarter crowdfunding platform, seeking co-financiers.

Based on the account by reporter Vasiliy Koroteev that appeared in the Red Army's newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, shortly after the Battle of Moscow, this is the story of Panifilov's Twenty-Eight, a group of twenty-eight soldiers of the Red Army's 316th Rifle Division, under the command of General Ivan Panfilov, that stopped the advance on Moscow of a column of fifty-four German tanks and hundreds of infantry who guarded tanks' flanks of the 11th Panzer Division for several days.

Specialists from Scandinava performed experiments on high-speed shooting and interested Druzhinin and Shalopu with his clip "Oil", in which a column of combustible liquid was rotating and ignited without the use of 3D animation.

Then the surveyors made measurements of the landscape, and Scandinava recreated the battlefield at a scale of 1:16 in the studio and photographed all the scenes with detailed models of tanks, reduced by 16 times.

To create a winter atmosphere in the film (snow, blizzard, the sky changing in the film's drama), the consequences of the attacks (smoke, ash), and to amplify gun shots and some explosions, Scandinava decided not to use the traditional approach using CGI (Computer-generated imagery, The letters "computer-generated images"), instead taking real natural effects on the camera.

For close-up shots, a full-size mock-up of the PzKpfw IV tank was built, the cabin of which was recreated on Lenfilm as a separate capsule on the springs, which made it possible to achieve realistic pitching during shooting.

The whole film was shot on the camera Arri Alexa (English) Russian, except for tanks, where because of the size required the apparatus of the company Red.

Optometry used a spherical lens Illumina of the St. Petersburg plant "LOMO" - according to the operator, this solution allowed to smooth out the effect of the "excessively high-quality" image, which is inherent in all modern cameras.

Choral parts are performed by vocalists of the Moscow Synodal Choir under the direction of the Honored Artist of Russia Aleksei Puzankov, instrumental musicians of the ensemble of soloists of the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Philharmonic.

In its opening weekend, Panfilov's 28 Men was the second highest grossing movie at the Russian and Belarus box office, behind the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.