Akira Kurosawa-Dersu Uzala (1975)

Against a backdrop of the treacherous mountains, rivers and icy plains of the Siberian wilderness, acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa stages an extraordinary adventure of comradeship and survival. KINO




For decades, Kurosawa had longed to film Vladimir Arsenyev's novel and was only able to do so at the invitation of Mosfilm Studios in Russia, who financed an arduous, two-year filmmaking expedition into the far reaches of Siberia. The Academy Award®-winning (Best Foreign-Language Film) Dersu Uzala is the enthralling tale of an eccentric Mongolian frontiersman (Maxim Manzuk) who is taken on as a guide by a Russian surveying crew. While the soldiers at first perceive Dersu as a naïve and comical relic of an uncivilized age, he quickly proves himself otherwise with displays of ingenuity and bravery unmatched by any member of the inexperienced mapping team, on more than one occasion becoming their unlikely savior. KINO




Most obviously inviting comparison to Kurosawa's epics Ran and Kagemusha, Dersu Uzala has just as much in common with the director's more elegaic dramas such as Ikiru and Dodes'ka-den. Through the eyes of a sympathetic Russian captain (Yuri Solomin), it tenderly observes the hunter's physical and spiritual decline, morunfully parallelled with the gradual disappearance of the wilderness itself – replaced by a civilized world that has no room for the barbaric. KINO




During an unusual chapter in the career of director Akira Kurosawa, the filmmaker went to Russia because he found working in his native Japan to be too difficult. The result was this striking 1975 near-epic based on the turn-of-the-century autobiographical novels of a military explorer (Yuri Solomin) who met and befriended a Goldi man in Russia's unmapped forests. Kurosawa traces the evolution of a deep and abiding bond between the two men, one civilized in the usual sense, the other at home in the sub-zero Siberian woods. There's no question that Dersu Uzala (the film is named for the Goldi character, played by Maxim Munzuk) has the muscular, imaginative look of a large-canvas Soviet Mosfilm from the 1970s. But in its energy and insight it is absolutely Kurosawa, from its implicit fascination with the meeting of opposite worlds to certain moments of tranquility and visual splendor. But nothing looks like Kurosawa more than a magnificent action sequence in which the co-heroes fight against time and exhaustion to stay alive in a wicked snowstorm. For fans of the late legend, this is a Kurosawa not to be missed. –Tom Keogh - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)