Akira Kurosawa · 1975 · overland

Kurosawa's only non-Japanese film, from Vladimir Arsenyev's 1923 memoir of surveying the Russian Far East. A Nanai hunter guides a Russian topographic expedition through the Ussuri taiga in 1902 and again in 1907, and the two men become friends - and then the hunter's eyes fail, and there is nowhere for him to go.

1. 1
   Shkotovo

   1902, and a topographic party under Captain Arsenyev is surveying the Ussuri when a Nanai hunter walks into their firelight - an old man alone since smallpox took his wife and children, who agrees to guide them.

2. 2
   Lake Khanka

   The frozen lake and the blizzard, and the scene the film exists for - Dersu setting the two of them to cutting reeds until they have a shelter, and Arsenyev collapsing inside it having been saved without understanding how.

3. 3
   The Sikhote-Alin

   1907, and Arsenyev is back mapping mountain ranges, hoping for months to run into his friend - and one night a soldier mentions an old hunter in the forest asking after their unit, and he runs out into the trees calling.

4. 4
   The Bikin

   The river country and the tiger: Dersu fires at an Amba he did not want to kill, and afterwards believes the spirits have turned against him - and his eyes are failing, and he knows he can no longer live out here.

5. 5
   Khabarovsk

   Arsenyev takes him home to live with his family in the city, and it does not work - a man who cannot pay for firewood or water, cannot fire a rifle in a park, and cannot sleep in a room.

6. 6
   Korfovskaya

   He goes back to the forest with a new rifle and is killed for it within days. Three years later Arsenyev returns to find the grave and the country has been cleared for development, and the two trees he marked it by are gone.