Ukrainian-born Larisa Shepitko was only 16 years old when she was admitted to the famous Soviet film school VGIK and taken under the wing of legend Alexander Dovzhenko, as the only woman in this fantastic litter in the last half of the fifties, where among others Elem Klimov, Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky left. Already with the graduation film Heat, Shepitko showed what an enormous talent she was, where she on the Kyrgyz steppes endured inhuman heat to bring to fruition a story about tradition versus modernization, about a man's place in nature and what consequences our choices have. The contrasts between the large open landscapes and the small people are something we see as a common thread throughout her filmography. This is especially clear in her next film - Wings - where the contrast between a woman's freedom to fly a fighter during World War II to a quiet life in her later years, becomes a melancholy elegy of lost opportunities. Unfortunately, this and the next film were quickly put on the shelf by the censorship, which is probably a lot of the reason why she has not got the status in film history she deserves.

She was luckier with the censor who watched her fourth feature film, The Ascent. This intense film about the two partisans Rybak and Sotnikov could just as easily have been banned with its religious allegories and unflattering images of Soviet defectors, but after the screening, a tearful censor gave a 40-minute speech full of praise for Shepitko's masterpiece. It was submitted to the Berlin Film Festival in 1977, where it received the Golden Bear for best film. Strengthened by this experience, Shepitko quickly set about her next project, something she herself described as her main work - Farewell. Unfortunately, she died only a few days after filming began, in a car accident in which the film's photographer and three others from the staff also died.

The opening images of The Ascent of a magical, snow-covered forest landscape are abruptly interrupted by machine-gun salvos and we are thrown into the brutal reality of the war. A group of partisans try to bring some civilians to safety behind the front lines, but it is clear that everyone's forces are singing the last verse. In a desperate attempt, the captain sends two privates to the nearest farm to provide much-needed supplies. For these two, this will be the start of a pure hell where they wade in the deep Ukrainian snow, hungry, frozen, with the knowledge that German patrols and defectors are everywhere. But for Shepitko, the physical hardships are not the most interesting, it is what these trials do to the psyche, what forces are set in motion when it really matters.