General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Ascent (Восхождение)

The Ascent (Восхождение) is a 1976 Soviet black-and-white war drama directed by Larisa Shepitko, based on Vasil Bykov's 1970 novella Sotnikov, about two Belarusian partisans captured by Nazi collaborators in occupied Belorussia in 1942 and forced to choose between martyrdom and betrayal.

Key fact	Detail
Director / source	Larisa Shepitko; screenplay by Yuri Klepikov and Shepitko from Vasil Bykov's novella Sotnikov¹
Setting	1942, Nazi-occupied Belorussia; two partisans leave their starving unit to find food and are captured²
Lead cast	Boris Plotnikov as Sotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin as Rybak, with Anatoly Solonitsyn as the interrogator Portnov and Lyudmila Polyakova as Demchikha¹
Key crew	Cinematography Vladimir Chukhnov and Pavel Lebeshev (black and white, 1.37:1); music Alfred Schnittke; art direction Yuri Raksha¹^•²
Runtime / format	110 minutes, black and white²
Soviet honors	Main prize (shared) at the All-Union Festival in Riga, 1977; USSR State Prize, 1979³

Spoilers

Story

Officer Sotnikov and soldier Rybak set out from the forest to a village to obtain food for their partisan detachment, which is suffering from shortages. The Germans overtake them; after a skirmish the two are captured and handed to the local collaborationist police. What follows is interrogation, torture, fear, and the search for a way out and a compromise, and the question the film poses is whether the heroes can pass through it all without losing their human face.² The two men respond in opposite ways: Sotnikov, wounded and failing, refuses to cooperate and goes to his death, while Rybak, who wants to live, agrees to serve the police, a choice the film treats as its own kind of destruction.¹

Religious allegory

Shepitko read the Bible in secret and wanted to put biblical images on screen; Bykov's war novella gave her a way to do it in 1976, since war and the face-to-face encounter with death expose what a person truly is. The result is a two-layered picture: behind the story of two captured partisans, one choosing to die standing and the other to live on his knees, runs a religious parable about what a person carries before death and whether he sees something beyond it.⁴ Individual shots suggest a crown of thorns, a cross, and an empty tomb; the procession to the gallows recalls Christ's walk to Golgotha, and the interrogation of Sotnikov by Portnov has been compared to Christ's interrogation by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.⁵ Bykov himself drew direct parallels between his partisan characters and the story of Jesus and Judas.⁶

The title itself carries the allegory. Shepitko replaced Bykov's title Sotnikov with the biblical Voskhozhdenie (Ascent); in his memoirs Bykov wrote that she had indeed striven toward an elevated religiosity and had even wanted to call the film Voznesenie (Ascension).⁷

Production

Getting the film made took years. On 30 December 1975, after four years of disputes and visits to offices at Goskino (soviet state film agency that censored and approved films), Shepitko finally received permission to film Sotnikov; on 3 January 1976 she was already shooting the first episodes in forty-degree frost near Murom.⁸ The crew deliberately chose the coldest days so that, in Shepitko's phrase, the actors would "feel winter on the cellular level".⁹ The conditions were harsh enough that the actors were driven close to nervous breakdown.¹⁰

Casting. For the debutant role of Sotnikov, Shepitko searched a long time and found Boris Plotnikov at the Sverdlovsk Theater for Young Spectators; Vladimir Gostyukhin also made his screen debut here, and both performances became central to the film's reputation.⁴

Censorship. The deadlock broke through an unusual route: her husband, the filmmaker Elem Klimov, bypassed Mosfilm and arranged a private screening for Pyotr Masherov, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia and himself a former partisan. Skeptical at first, expecting "women's directing", Masherov was weeping within twenty minutes, and the film was accepted without a single correction.⁹

Reception and awards

At the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977 the film won the Golden Bear, the FIPRESCI prize, a special mention of the international evangelical jury, and the prize of the international Catholic film organization (OCIC).³ In the Soviet Union it shared the main prize at the All-Union Festival in Riga in 1977 and received the USSR State Prize in 1979.³ It drew 10.7 million viewers in its first year of release.¹¹

Critics have kept the film in the canon: it appears in Steven Schneider's 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die⁴, and the director and critic Mark Cousins has called it "the best war movie ever filmed".¹² The Criterion Collection released it on Blu-ray with a new 4K restoration, describing it as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema.¹

Shepitko's last film

The Ascent was the last completed film of Shepitko's career. In 1979, while preparing her next picture, an adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's Proshchanie s Matyoroy, she was killed in a car accident at age 41, together with the film's cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov, production designer Yuri Fomenko, and three other crew members.¹³ Klimov completed that film, released as Proshchanie (Farewell), and in 1980 made the short tribute Larisa in her memory.⁴^•¹ The film's stark moral and visual world is often compared with Klimov's own Come and See (1985), which shares its brutal honesty in a quieter register.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1963 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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