Letter Never Sent (Neotpravlennoye pismo)

Wednesday 30 September at 7.30pm

Mikhail Kalatozov | USSR | 1960 | 96 mins | TBC

Four Soviet geologists discover a diamond cache in the remote Siberian wilderness, only to be trapped by a devastating forest fire in this cinematically adventurous tale of survival.

“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