Larisa Shepitko

Biography

Larisa Shepitko (born in Artemovsk, now Bakhmut, 1938; died in Kalinin Oblast, 1979) was a Soviet film director, screenwriter and actress, widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of her era. She belonged to the new wave that emerged during the Khrushchev Thaw, alongside Elem Klimov and Andrei Tarkovsky. Her work, often concerned with loneliness and isolation, made her one of the most distinctive voices in Soviet cinema.

Raised by her mother, a schoolteacher, after her father left the family, she trained at VGIK in Moscow, where she studied under Alexander Dovzhenko until his death in 1956. She graduated in 1963 with Heat, shot in Kyrgyzstan from a story by Chingiz Aitmatov, which won prizes at Karlovy Vary and Leningrad. That same year she married Klimov, who had helped her edit the film.

Wings (1966) portrayed a former wartime pilot who becomes a school principal and struggles with peacetime, and it brought her first clashes with the authorities. The Beginning of an Unknown Era (1967), in which she directed one episode, was shelved by the censors for two decades. You and Me (1971), about two surgeons, was well received in Venice but barely seen in the Soviet Union. After her work on Belorussian Station was taken away from her, she made The Ascent (1977), adapted from Vasil Bykov's novella Sotnikov, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin and whose export was banned.

Her films combine austere realism with striking visual imagery and a moral reflection on war and conscience. She died in 1979 in a car accident while scouting locations for Farewell. Her husband made a tribute documentary, Larisa, and her work is remembered as that of a filmmaker who looked for her own voice rather than following male models.

Key films

• Heat (1963): graduation film set in a new farming commune in Central Asia, seen through a recent school leaver.
• Wings (1966): portrait of a former wartime fighter pilot unable to adjust to peace, with Maya Bulgakova in the lead.
• You and Me (1971): drama about two surgeons with different ideas of success, much discussed in Venice.
• The Ascent (1977): her most celebrated work, about partisans in Belarus captured by the Nazis, awarded the Golden Bear.