The Ascent · reception & legacy
1977 · Larisa Shepitko
How The Ascent has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1977 — the first Soviet film to do so — yet stayed hard to see in the West for decades after Shepitko's death; the 2021 Criterion release and Letterboxd word-of-mouth turned it into a full-blown rediscovery.
What's debated
The perennial cinephile debate is whether it's actually greater than Come and See — the more famous Soviet WWII film made by Shepitko's own husband, Elem Klimov — with a vocal camp insisting The Ascent is the deeper of the two.
Its footprint
It lives in culture as the haunting other half of a husband-and-wife diptych with Come and See, and as a fixture on 'greatest films directed by women' lists — its snowbound, icon-like close-ups are endlessly screenshotted and shared.
Where it stands
A canon climber: once a festival-laurelled obscurity, now a Letterboxd darling routinely called one of the greatest war films ever made.