The Ascent

Two Soviet partisans, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), set out across the snow in the freezing winter of the Second World War to find food for their starving unit. The Germans hold the country around them, and the cold is its own enemy. Larisa Shepitko shot in black and white through a brutal winter, and Sotnikov, sick and underdressed, keeps walking, unsure what he is carrying inside him.