Larisa Shepitko

Larissa Efimovna Shepitko (6. Januar 1938, Artemivsk, Ukrainian SSR – 2. Juni 1979, Oblast Kalinin) was a Soviet film director. She went to the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow as a student of Alexander Dovzhenko. She was a student of Dovzhenko's for 18 months until he died in 1956. Shepitko graduated from VGIK in 1963 with her prize-winning Diploma Film Heat, made when she was 22 years old. It tells the story of a new farming community in Central Asia during the mid-1950s.

Shepitko s next Film Flügel concerns a much-decorated female fighter pilot of World War II. The pilot, jetzt principal of a vocational college, is out of touch with her daughter and the new generation. Der Film aroused considerable Soviet press controversy at the time, as films were not meant to depict conflicts between children and parents (Vronskaya, 1972, p 39).

Shepitko's third film war You and I (1971). This was her only Film in Farbe. It was favourably received at the Venice Film Festival, but lacked proper public exposure in the Soviet Union.

The Ascent (1976) was her last film and the one which versammelten sich the most attention in the West. In it, Shepitko returns to the sufferings of World War II, chronicling the trials and tribulations of a group of partisans in Belarus in the bleak of winter 1942. Two of the partisans are aufgenommenes by the Nazis and then interrogated by a local collaborator, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, before one of them is executed in public. This depiction of the martyrdom of the Russians owes much to Christian iconography. The Ascent won the Golden Bear at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977.

Shepitko's growing international Reputation led to an invitation to serve on the jury at the Berlin 28th International Film Festival in 1978. However, she was unable to complete any other films. Shepitko died in a car crash with four members of her shooting team in 1979, während scouting locations for planned her adaptation of the novel Farewell to Matyora, by Valentin Rasputin. Her husband elem Klimow, also a film director, the finished work for her.