Of all the dazzlingly talented filmmakers to emerge from the Soviet Union, Larisa Shepitko has remained one of the least widely known. While many of her film school contemporaries, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and her eventual husband Elem Klimov, went on to international renown, Shepitko has remained under the radar—even though at the height of her career she was on the verge of breaking through to the same kind of acclaim as her much better-remembered compatriots. Sadly, that career ended at the moment of her ascendance, when she was killed in a car crash outside of Leningrad at the age of forty, leaving behind a child, a husband to keep alive her legacy, and a brilliant, if small, body of work, comprising just four feature films.
Shepitko was born in Ukraine in 1938. When she was still very young, her father, a Persian officer, divorced her schoolteacher mother, leaving her to raise three children on her own. Following this early abandonment (which seems to have inflected her work, often dealing with loneliness or isolation), Shepitko moved at age sixteen to Moscow, where she eventually entered the famed All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography. Though at the time the Soviet film industry was still in a post–World War II downturn, soon enough Shepitko found herself part of a new generation of young filmmakers artistically encouraged by the freer atmosphere of Khrushchev’s thaw. Even more auspiciously, she came under the tutelage of one of the nation’s greatest film artists, seminal Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko.
1976
111 min
Black and White
1.33:1
1966
85 min
Black and White
1.33:1