About the film
Winter 1942. Sotnikov, a sick former teacher, and Rybak, a strong and practical fighter, leave their starving partisan unit to find food. A wound, a farmhouse and a police patrol lead to capture.
Under interrogation, the two men's paths separate. Shepitko shoots the snowy landscape in stark black and white and turns a war story into a moral drama of enormous power.
The Ascent was the first Soviet film to win the Golden Bear in Berlin. Shepitko died in a car accident two years later, at 41.
Did you know?
- It won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival.
- Boris Plotnikov had never acted in films before.
- Director Larisa Shepitko was married to Elem Klimov, director of Come and See.
