1. Larisa Yefimovna Shepitko was a Soviet film director and screenwriter of Ukrainian origin.
30 Facts About Larisa Shepitko
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Larisa Shepitko is considered one of the best female directors of all time, with her film The Ascent being the second film directed by a woman to win a Golden Bear and the third film directed by a woman to win a top award at a major European film festival.
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Larisa Shepitko's career was cut short in 1979 when she was killed in a car accident while scouting locations for the film Farewell.
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Larisa Shepitko was born in Artemovsk, a town in Eastern Ukraine now known as Bakhmut.
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Larisa Shepitko moved to Moscow when she was sixteen, entering the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography as a student of Alexander Dovzhenko.
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Larisa Shepitko was a student of Dovzhenko's for 18 months until he died in 1956.
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Larisa Shepitko felt a kinship between their shared heritage and social realist imagery.
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Larisa Shepitko graduated from VGIK in 1963 with her prize winning diploma film Heat, or Znoy, made when she was 22 years old.
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Larisa Shepitko's film showed Dovzhenko's impression, both in its parched setting and its naturalistic style.
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Larisa Shepitko has so internalized the military ideas of service and obedience that she cannot adjust to life during peacetime.
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Larisa Shepitko brings to light the inner life of a middle-aged woman who must reconcile her past with her present reality.
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Larisa Shepitko expresses this by contrasting her character's repression, marked by claustrophobic interiors and tight compositions, with heavenly, expansive shots of sky and clouds, representing the freedom of her flying days.
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In 1977 Larisa Shepitko released The Ascent, her last completed film and the one which received the most attention in the West.
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Larisa Shepitko wanted the film to adhere to the authenticity of what Soviet soldiers would have experienced during World War II.
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Larisa Shepitko refused any special treatment and only wore clothing that the cast wore to embody the suffering that they went through.
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Larisa Shepitko's growing international reputation led to an invitation to serve on the jury at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival in 1978.
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Larisa Shepitko was offered a chance to direct in Hollywood, which she put off until she could improve her English.
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Larisa Shepitko began working on the production of the film Belorussian Station in 1971 and planned to change the optimistic tone of the original tale to a more tragic one.
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Larisa Shepitko was an extra in Eldar Ryazanov's Carnival Night and played Hanna in Yuriy Lysenko's Tavriya.
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Larisa Shepitko appeared briefly in her husband Elem Klimov's film Sport, Sport, Sport, released in 1970.
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Larisa Shepitko's shot compositions frequently focus on body parts which creates a sense of intimacy with her characters.
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Larisa Shepitko employs grand landscape shots and the use of negative space to emphasize the isolation faced by her characters.
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In Wings, Larisa Shepitko depicts a post-World War II setting where an ex-pilot reminisces being seen as a hero of the war.
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In 1963, Larisa Shepitko met Elem Klimov while finishing her film Heat.
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Larisa Shepitko struggled with physical and mental health problems at various points in her career.
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Larisa Shepitko died in a car crash on a highway near the city of Tver with four members of her shooting team in 1979 while scouting locations for her planned adaptation of the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin.
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Larisa Shepitko started describing what she imagined the future film to be like, and she was so passionate about it, so interested in it, that I completely forgot my intention not to let go of Matyora.
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Larisa Shepitko made a total of five feature-length films, including a TV film In the Thirteenth Hour of the Night.
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Larisa Shepitko made the second segment of the omnibus film Beginning of an Unknown Era.
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Larisa Shepitko died in 1979 when her last film, Farewell, just started filming.