Larysa Efimovna Shepitko was a renowned Ukrainian Soviet film director, born on January 6, 1938, in Artemivsk, Ukrainian SSR. She was a student of the esteemed Olexander Dovzhenko at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where she studied for 18 months until Dovzhenko's untimely death in 1956.
Shepitko went on to graduate from the VGIK in 1963 with her prize-winning diploma film Heat, a cinematic masterpiece made when she was just 22 years old. This film tells the captivating story of a new farming community in Central Asia during the mid-1950s.
Her subsequent film, Wings, focuses on a much-decorated female fighter pilot of World War II, who, now a principal of a vocational college, struggles to connect with her daughter and the new generation. The film sparked considerable controversy in the Soviet press at the time, as it dared to depict conflicts between children and parents, a theme deemed taboo in Soviet cinema.
Shepitko's third film, You and I (1971),was her only work in color and received positive reviews at the Venice Film Festival, although it lacked proper exposure in the Soviet Union.
The Ascent (1976),her final film, garnered international attention and won the Golden Bear at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. This powerful and poignant film chronicles the trials and tribulations of a group of partisans in Belarus during the bleak winter of 1942, exploring the themes of martyrdom and Christian iconography.
Shepitko's growing reputation as an international filmmaker led to her invitation to serve on the jury at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival in 1978. Tragically, she died in a car crash on June 2, 1979, while scouting locations for her planned adaptation of the novel Farewell to Matyora, by Valentin Rasputin. Her husband, Elem Klimov, a fellow film director, completed the work for her.
