Larisa Shepitko’s directorial career is bracketed by two films, Heat (Znoi,1963) and Farewell (Proshchanie, 1981), that directly engage Soviet environmental practices by looking at specific episodes of the Soviet “conquest” of nature and its effects on human life. In Heat, it is the effort to develop the virgin deserts of Kyrgyzstan into fertile agricultural fields that comes under the camera’s close scrutiny. And in Farewell—a work that was mostly filmed by Shepitko’s husband Elem Klimov after she died in a car accident just at the start of the shoot—it is the life and death of Matiora, a small island shown in its last days of existence, just before it would be flooded as part of a hydroelectric station’s construction. Based on these two films, it is safe to say that the natural consequences of Soviet industrial developments were central to Shepitko’s cinematic thinking. This is not at all surprising, given that ecological criticism began to permeate Soviet public and scientific debates with increasing urgency in the 1960s and especially 1970s, just at the height of Shepitko’s career. It was, indeed, becoming a pervasive matter that was impossible to ignore. Shepitko’s environmental filmmaking, furthermore, is not to be restricted to works explicitly about the Soviet industrialization of nature. Although her most acclaimed production, The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1977), is far removed from such a focus, turning instead to partisan fighting in rural Belorussia during World War II, nature remains crucial to the film. More than half its running time pictures Belorussia’s open, freezing, snow-covered landscapes that are endlessly traversed by its protagonists—with the spaces’ overwhelming, strange whiteness providing a lasting image of the environment within which human struggles transpire.