Dersu Uzala

Dersu Uzala (1961) is a Soviet adventure film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Agasi Babayan and adapted from Vladimir Arsenyev's Far Eastern field journals.

Explorer Arsenyev heads into the Ussuri taiga, where Dersu Uzala becomes his guide — a Nanai hunter who knows the forest the way city people know their own streets. The two men come from opposite worlds and communicate mostly through action; the wilderness handles the rest. Kasym Zhakibayev brings Dersu to life with a directness that bypasses any sense of performance. This 1961 version was the first screen adaptation of Arsenyev's writing — made fourteen years before Akira Kurosawa returned to the same source material. Watch Dersu Uzala online on iFILM.