A loving film tribute to Russian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, who died tragically in a car accident in 1979 at the age of 40 This documentary by her husband, Elem Klimov, includes excerpts from all of Shepitko's films, and her own voice is heard talking about her life and art Elem Klimov's griefstricken elegy Larisa examines the life of his late wife—the film director Larisa Shepitko—through a series of directaddress interviews and photomontages, set against a mournful visualmusical backdrop Typically, Klimov films his subjects which include himself and several of Shepitko's collaborators within a stark, snowcovered forest, its tangled web of trees standing in as metaphorical representation of a perhaps inexpressible suffering, the result of Shepitko's premature death while filming her adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's novella Farewell to Matyora Interweaving home movie footage with sequences from Shepitko's work Maya Bulgakova's pensive plane crash reminiscence from Wings takes on several new layers of resonance in this context, Larisa's most powerful passage is its first accompanied by the grandiose final music cue from Shepitko's You and I, Klimov dissolves between a series of personal photographs that encompass Larisa's entire life, from birth to death This brief symphony of sorrow anticipates the cathartic reversemotion climax of Klimov's Come and See, though by placing the scene first within Larisa's chronology, Klimov seems to be working against catharsis The pain is clearly fresh, the wound still festering, and Klimov wants—above all—to capture how deep misery's knife has cut
