'The Ascent' (1977)
Larisa's Shepitko's bleak WWII-era film begins with a shot of a frozen Russian landscape, with the sound of howling wind and distant gunfire in the background: It doesn't get a whole lot more cheery from there. The story is simple enough to be a fable, an allegory, with which the late Shepitko, a veteran Soviet filmmaker born in the Ukraine a few years before the war, painted the entire miserable enterprise.
Source: arkansasonline.com