Dersu Uzala

Dersu Uzala follows a Russian military explorer, Vladimir Arseniev, who leads a surveying expedition through the unmapped forests along the Ussuri River in Siberia in 1902. There he meets a solitary Goldi hunter and nomad named Dersu Uzala, who agrees to guide the small team through the taiga. The two men form a close bond despite their different backgrounds: Arseniev approaches the wilderness as a man of science, while Dersu knows it intimately, reading weather signs and animal trails in ways that repeatedly save the group. When their time together ends, the friendship weighs heavily on both. Years later, a second expedition brings them together again, renewing an association that has come to mean a great deal to each of them.

The film was directed by Akira Kurosawa, the eighteenth of the twenty-three features he made, arriving after Red Beard and before Kagemusha. He wrote the screenplay with Yuriy Nagibin, and the production was mounted in the Soviet Union with Japanese backing. Yuriy Solomin plays Arseniev and Maksim Munzuk plays the title role, surrounded by a supporting cast that includes Mikhail Bychkov, Vladimir Kremena, Aleksandr Pyatkov and Svetlana Danilchenko. Made on a budget of four million dollars, it runs 141 minutes.

Audience responses have been strong: on IMDb it holds 8.2 from roughly 36,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.9 from about 655 votes. A critics' rating of 7.5 from fifteen reviews places it somewhat below those viewer scores.