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 grief-stricken elegy Larisa examines the life of his late wife—the film director Larisa Shepitko—through a series of direct-address interviews and photomontages, set against a mournful visual-musical backdrop. Typically, Klimov films his subjects (which include himself and several of Shepitko's collaborators) within a stark, snow-covered 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 reverse-motion 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.

根据苏俄当代大作家拉斯普京的小说《告别马焦拉》改编。为了建设水电站，东西伯利亚安加拉河上的马焦拉村将被淹没，在村子里生活了一辈子的老人们无论如何都不愿告别旧生活……

This faultless production has a dream-like quality. The frustrations and uncertainties of young people in love during lazy days in summer are beautifully portrayed. I was puzzled by the reference to all the dead bees that summer (apparently it happens sometimes). Perhaps it suggests that in nature nothing is certain. Human relationships are likewise unpredictable in their outcomes. This sumptuous film is suffused with a glorious ethereal quality-sheer poetry.