During a freezing WWII winter, two Soviet partisans on a mission to gather food contend with the temperature, the occupying Germans, and their own psyches.
Cinematography
Blinding snow becomes psychological landscape, erasing horizon
Direction
Shepitko's final masterpiece before her death at 41
Acting
Plotnikov's martyred silence versus Gostyukhin's sweating desperation
Director
Larisa Shepitko
Boris Plotnikov
Sotnikov
Vladimir Gostyukhin
Rybak
Anatoliy Solonitsyn
Portnov, collaborationist interrogator
Lyudmila Polyakova
Avginya Demchikha, the mother
Viktoriya Goldentul
Basya Meyer, the girl
Sergei Yakovlev
Petr Sych, village elder
Mariya Vinogradova
Village elder's wife
Mykola Sektymenko
Stas Gomenyuk, collaborationist policeman
Leonid Yukhin
Partisan commander
Vladimir Rudyy
German officer with black glasses
Vasili Kravtsov
German officer
Vladimir Tkalich
German officer
Aleksandr Pyatkov
German soldier, executioner
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Shepitko, a devout Christian in Soviet cinema, smuggled religious allegory past censors by making Sotnikov's martyrdom ambiguously spiritual rather than explicitly Christian.
The film was withheld from export for years; Western audiences first saw it when Kira Muratova championed Shepitko's work posthumously. Shepitko died in a car crash at 41, leaving this her final completed film.
SU
