The Khrushchev Thaw was a direct response to the limitations that were forced upon Soviet citizens during Stalin's reign, and essentially marked the inception of an innovative return to the cinematic arts.

Shepitko moved to Moscow when she was sixteen, entering the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography as a student of Alexander Dovzhenko.

In the film, Kemel, a recent school graduate, travels into an isolated part of the steppes to work in a small communal farm camp in Central Asia during the mid-1950s.

Temperatures on locations could reach upwards of 50 degrees Celsius which caused the film to melt inside of the camera numerous times.

[13] Heat won the Symposium Grand Prix ex aequo at the Karlovy Vary IFF in 1964[14] and an award at the All-Union Film Festival in Leningrad.

[15] Shepitko's first post-institute film Wings concerns a much-decorated female fighter pilot of World War II.

She expresses this by contrasting her character's repression, marked by claustrophobic interiors and tight compositions, with heavenly, expansive shots of sky and clouds, representing the freedom of her flying days.

In 1967, she shot the second of the three episodes in a portmanteau film titled Beginning of an Unknown Era, made to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution.

Two of the episodes, including The Homeland of Electricity, were found and shown publicly for the first time in 1987, but the film in its complete original form is believed lost.

Adapted from a novel by Vasili Bykov, Shepitko returns to the sufferings of World War II, chronicling the trials and tribulations of a group of pro-Soviet partisans in Belarus in the bleak winter of 1942.

Two of the partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak, are captured by the Wehrmacht and then interrogated by a local collaborator, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, before four of them are executed in public.

[17] It was also the official submission of the Soviet Union for the Best Foreign Language Film of the 50th Academy Awards in 1978, and it was included in "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" by Steven Schneider.

She began working on the production of the film Belorussian Station in 1971 and planned to change the optimistic tone of the original tale to a more tragic one.

Shepitko's filmmaking style is often associated with realism, characterized by a substantial degree of naturalism that emits a genuine depiction of the subject matter she explores.

Examples of this can be seen in The Ascent where two soldiers struggle to survive in the middle of a snowstorm, and in Wings where an ex-war pilot flies alone, illustrating her disconnect from modern society.

During her hospitalization, Shepitko suffered a fall that damaged her spine, which complicated her pregnancy and made the birth of her son Anton in 1973 a near-death experience.

Shepitko died in a car crash on a highway near the city of Tver with four members of her shooting team in 1979 while scouting locations for her planned adaptation of the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin.

Andrei Tarkovsky, a fellow filmmaker and friend of Shepitko, wrote in his journal about the event after attending her funeral, "... A car accident.

[28] Her husband, the director Elem Klimov, finished the work under the title Farewell and also made a 25-minute tribute entitled Larisa (1980).

"Critics maintained that the final product lacked Shepitko’s unique personal vision, obviously a point of view that could never be replicated".

Composer Alfred Schnittke, who had worked with Shepitko many times previously on scoring her films, dedicated his String Quartet No.

Klimov's tribute short film Larisa claims that Shepitko had been preparing all her life to make Farewell, and that it would have certainly been the high point of her career.

[33] In 2022, the Australian Cinémathèque at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane, Australia presented a complete retrospective of Shepitko's works.

[34] The program, curated by Robert Hughes, included Shepitko's four feature films, along with Beginning of an Unknown Era and her television-movie musical revue In the Thirteenth Hour of the Night.

The retrospective also showcased two films by Elem Klimov; Larisa, a tribute short commemorating Shepitko's life and legacy and Farewell, completed posthumously in her honour.