Heat

Director: Larisa Shepitko, Larisa Shepitko

1963 / 75min / DCP

Shepitko was only 25 years old when she produced this, her astonishingly assured debut feature, based on a short story by young writer Chinghiz Aitmatov about the conflict between idealistic teenager Kemel and the domineering, tyrannical Abakir, living and working side-by-side in the same Kyrgyzstan collective. Shot on location, with great difficulty on the arid, sweltering steppes of the far-flung Soviet republic—at one point Shepitko was directing from a stretcher!—the ravishing black-and-white Heat takes visual inspiration from the films of Alexander Dovzhenko, briefly the wunderkind Shepitko’s instructor at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow.