Неотправленное письмо / Letter Never Sent (1958 Mikhail Kalatozov)

Not as stunning as Soy Cuba (but then what is?), film is as classily shot by Urusevsky as you'd expect. Good cast: Tatanya Samojlova (also The Cranes are Flying), Evgeniy Urbanskiy, Innokentiy Smoktunovsiy, Vasiliy Livanov.

As if The Revenant wasn't enough epic wilderness survival, here Soviet geologists search and search for Siberian diamonds, and are variously killed by forest fire, suicide and cold. But Soviet spirit prevails and one plucky survivor is just found in time - by helicopter - on an ice floe with the precious location map, as an aerial shot tracks out over the frozen beauty.

It's quite funny in a way.

My print says it was released in 1958. It was entered into the 1960 Cannes Film Festival (for the record La Dolce Vita won, and L'Avventura and Ichikawa's Kagi got the Jury prizes).

It's one of those wet films, in which characters seem constantly to be wading through water, mucking about in it, being rained on by it, looking for mythical rivers and floating along on them. In that respect there's a kind of stylistic link to Tarkovsky's Stalker, another Russian film which has water everywhere.