DIRECTOR: Mikhail Kalatozov
PRODUCTION CO: Mosfilm
​SCREENPLAY: Grigory Koltunov, Valery Osipov, Viktor Rozov
PHOTOGRAPHY: Sergey Urusevsky
EDITOR: N Anikina
MUSIC: Nikolai Kryukov

WITH: Innokenty Smoktunovsky (Konstantin Fyodorovich Sabinin), Tatiana Samoilova (Tanya), Vasily Livanov (Andrei), Yevgeni Urbansky (Sergei Stepanovich), Galina Kozhakina (Vera)

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REVIEWS

“The great Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov, known for his virtuosic, emotionally gripping films, perhaps never made a more visually astonishing one than Letter Never Sent. This absorbing tale of exploration and survival concerns the four members of a geological expedition, who are stranded in the bleak and unforgiving Siberian wilderness while on a mission to find diamonds. Luxuriating in wide-angle beauty and featuring one daring shot after another (the brilliant cinematography is by Kalatozov’s frequent collaborator Sergei Urusevsky), Letter Never Sent is a fascinating piece of cinematic history and a universal adventure of the highest order.”

– Janus Films

“The long unavailable masterpiece from the pioneering plan-sequence godheads Mikhail Kalatozov and DP Sergei Urusevsky… With their unique arsenal of mobile camera, infrared stock, infinite range and deep composition, the two filmmakers adapt Valeri Osipovs’s book about a four-person geological team hunting for diamonds in Sibera… Electrified by the film’s visual assault and battery, which is shot almost 100 per cent on location, Flaherty-Herzog style, but which nevertheless careens, starting with its first unearthly helicopter shot, from the Dantean to the ur-Gothic to passages that are only Kalatozovian… If this isn’t pure cinema there may be no such thing.”

– Michael Atkinson, Sight & Sound

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FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Timaru
​Tuesday, 21 April, 6.30pm

Queenstown 
Tuesday, 12 May, 8.00pm

Auckland  
Monday, 25 May, 6.15pm

Hamilton   
Monday, 08 June, 6.30pm​

Whanganui   
Monday, 27 July, 7.00pm​

Canterbury
Monday, 10 August, 7.00pm

Dunedin
Wednesday, 30 September, 7.30pm

​Wellington   
Monday, 12 October, 6.00pm​

Wellington   
Monday, 12 October, 8.30pm​​

​Tauranga
Wednesday, 28 October, 6.00pm

Palmerston North  
Wednesday, 11 November, 6.00pm

Westport  
Wednesday, 09 December, 7.00pm​
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MIKHAIL KALATOZOV >> ​