Adventure · Drama
Soviet (Дерсу Узала)
1975 · Directed by Akira Kurosawa · 141 min
In the early 1900s, a Russian army surveyor leads a mapping expedition into the remote forests of the Far East. There he meets Dersu, a solitary hunter who reads the wilderness as others read a page. A quiet, patient adventure about two very different ways of knowing the world.
Why it matters in cinema history
A late landmark of Kurosawa's career and a rare Cold War collaboration between Japanese and Soviet filmmakers, it is a defining example of the humanist wilderness epic in 1970s world cinema.
Watch with intention
Watch the film as a study of two kinds of knowledge: the surveyor's maps and instruments, and the hunter's attention to the land itself.
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