Anastasia Sorokina: The Lady Vanishes

Anastasia Sorokina: The Lady Vanishes

ON JUNE 2, 1979, the greatest Soviet director you’ve never heard of was killed in a car crash outside Leningrad. The tragedy opens a page of Andrei Tarkovsky’s diary: “Larisa Shepitko was buried, and so were five members of her team. A car accident. All killed instantly. It was so sudden that no adrenaline was found in their blood” (qtd. in Ivan-Zadeh). Shepitko was only forty-one years old.

In the years that followed, the global film industry mourned her loss, transcending Cold War politics – fast-forward to the present, however, and Shepitko becomes an unfamiliar name. Today, only two of her films are available on DVD in the United States, and, according to film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, these films are “scarcely shown or known” in Russia. yet, at the time of her death, Shepitko was “hot property on the international film circuit.” young and “strikingly attractive,” the camera-ready director had just achieved a career milestone with her masterpiece The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1977), which won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival. According to Ivan-Zadeh, “she had all the live-fast-die-young glamour that would ensure instant icon status for far inferior artists.”