About

Heat was Larisa Shepitko’s graduate film from the esteemed Moscow film school VGIK. Shot in the vast expanse of the Kazakh steppe, it was a notably gruelling production: the temperatures grew so high that the film stock melted in the camera and Shepitko was forced to direct sections of the film from a stretcher after falling ill.

Despite these hurdles, the completed film is a visually stunning and thought-provoking depiction of conflict on an isolated communal farm. It follows an idealistic young student whose belief in modern agricultural techniques puts him at odds with the traditional methods of the farm’s authoritarian leader.

The influence of Shepitko’s mentor Alexander Dovzhenko is evident in the interrogation of class division and the poetic manner in which she shoots the rural terrain. As with her later Wings 1966 and The Ascent 1977, Shepitko dwarfs her characters against the expanse of nature; in those films, people are shown as miniscule figures amidst the sky and snow, but here it is the seemingly infinite vastness of the scorching landscape that drives home their isolation.