Refocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko

Despite the brief span of her directorial career, lasting from 1963 to 1979, the Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko produced a remarkable body of work, one that received an expansive national and international attention and led her to winning the Golden Bear Awards at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1977. Refocus: The Cinema of Larisa Shepitko is the first volume in English to offer a comprehensive, methodologically diverse analysis of Shepitko’s oeuvre, demonstrating the ongoing significance of her work for filmmakers and scholars alike. The book not only considers the emergence of Shepitko’s cinema within Soviet political and cultural history but examines its continued relevance for thinking about such pressing contemporary issues as war and trauma, history, memory and subjectivity, and ecology and the environment.

Lida Oukaderova is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art History at Rice University in Houston, USA, and the author of The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement.