The Ascent

Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent won the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival — the first Soviet film to win the Berlinale's top prize. Shepitko was thirty-eight at the time of the win and at the height of her career; she would die in a car accident two years later, on 2 July 1979, while scouting locations for her next feature in Karelia. Her husband, Elem Klimov, completed her unfinished work as Larisa (1980) and Farewell (1983).

The film is adapted from Vasil Bykaŭ's 1970 novella Sotnikov, a foundational text of Belarusian Soviet literature about partisan warfare and collaboration. The screenplay is credited to Yuri Klepikov; the cinematography is by Vladimir Chukhnov, working in extreme cold on actual winter locations in the Murmansk region with deliberately stark high-contrast black-and-white imagery. The score is by Alfred Schnittke, the composer who would also score Klimov's Come and See eight years later.

Sight & Sound returned The Ascent to its Greatest Films of All Time list in 2022 at #181, alongside the much more famous Come and See directly above it. The two films are now widely treated as a paired masterwork on the Eastern Front in Belarus — Klimov's later film made partly in tribute to Shepitko's earlier achievement on the same material. Shepitko had been one of the most distinguished students of Aleksandr Dovzhenko at VGIK in Moscow.