Dersu Uzala

Superbly photographed in widescreen and in colour, Kurosawa’s made-in-Siberia epic, financed with Soviet money, won the 1975 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and was the great director’s first movie since a well-publicized 1971 suicide attempt. It was also the only Kurosawa film made outside Japan. Set against what Kurosawa described as “the astonishingly beautiful, gigantic and awesome Great Nature of the Ussuri region of Russia,” the film takes place in the early years of the 20th century, and centres on the relationship between Arseniev (Yuri Salomin), leader of a team of army engineers come to chart Russia’s remote border with China, and Dersu Uzala (Maxim Munzuk), the nomadic Siberian hunter who acts as their guide. Over a series of expeditions, a fast friendship develops between the man of civilization and the titular man of the wilderness, whose traditional way of life cannot survive the onslaught of modernity and technology. The film’s most celebrated sequence has the two principals lost in the midst of a fierce Siberian blizzard. “The colour and shot compositions of Dersu Uzala are extraordinary” (Donald Richie). “Like so much of Kurosawa’s work, this is a film of great humanism and respect” (James Monaco). Colour, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 141 mins.