There are things more important than one’s own hide.

This action-filled and poetic war movie, set in Nazi-occupied Belarus in the bleak winter of 1942, switches gears twice. The Ascent follows two anti-Nazi partisans through a snowy landscape into a prison camp, analyzing how one of them, a man of action, is manipulated and dismantled, while his weaker-seeming comrade comes to understand his one remaining role: martyr. Tarkovsky’s favorite actor, Anatoli Solonitsyn, plays the cynical torturer whose job it is to break their will.

Larisa Shepitko, a student of Dovzhenko’s, died in a car accident while scouting locations for her next film. Elem Klimov, her husband, completed that film, Farewell (1983), made a documentary about Shepitko, and then directed Come and See (1985), the definitive Soviet film on the brutality of the Great Patriotic War and perhaps the most horrifying war movie ever made. Based on his own experiences as a child in Belarus under the Nazis, it was also made under the spell of Sheptiko’s Ascent. – A.S. Hamrah