She died too young. Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko managed to shoot several films before the automobile accident that cost her her life at forty-one years of age. This year's Karlovy Vary Festival is offering five of them, introduced by the director's son Anton Klimov. Her crowning drama The Ascent will be playing tomorrow for the last time at 14:00 in the Grand Hall.
When Larisa Shepitko came out with her feature-length debut Heat at twenty-five years old, the critics did not quite know what to make of her. They wrote that the film had been shot with a "man's hand" and the label of an author of "men's movies" has stuck with her to date. Maybe it is in part because at first glance she looked like a frail woman. "Yes, it's become a cliché," her son Anton Klimov says. "But in many ways there's something to it. Her films are very masculine and brutal."
This is also the case of her most famous and unfortunately also final completed work The Ascent, which tells a tale inspired by biblical mythology of two Soviet partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak, who are captured by a Nazi patrol. In the beginning, Rybak seems to be the braver and more capable, but faced with death the roles of the two figures dramatically switch. The adaptation of the novel by Vasil Bykov won the Golden Bear award at the Berlinale in 1977.
You can read the whole article by Zbyněk Vlasák on Larisa Shepitko in tomorrow's Festival Daily.
