The action in this lavishly produced film takes place at an oddly ark-shaped mansion during World War I, and in spirit (although not in story) it reflects the play which inspired it, the ferociously antiwar Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. A large group of family and friends have gathered...
This film was Sokurov's first feature at Lenfilm, roughly based on a short story by the contemporary Soviet writer Grigory Baklanov about the transitional period from power to subordinance.
A requiem for a Russian peasant woman, Maria Semionovna Voinova. The film is in two chapters. The first chapter consists of an impression of Maria Semionovna, scenes of the colours of summer time: hay–making, bathing in a river, work in the flax fields and a holiday in the Crimea. The second...
Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The...
1945, an attack aviation regiment is based at the field airfield, which is served by a team of young girls. The last days of the war are coming... In one of the battles, Lieutenant Volynin’s attack aircraft, damaged by a shell fragment, landed in territory occupied by the Germans. Air gunner...
This intimately narrated journey from Russia to Rotterdam, via rail, road and Finnish ferry, is a melancholy meditation on divinity, time and place in art, purpose (or its lack) and the loneliness of the soul. Passing through misty snowscapes, half-glimpsed cities and the icy night sea-swell.
These images and sounds are poetic metaphors that transform “Elegy from Russia” into a document that provides a emotional–historical “memory bank” for all.
This film was created by Sokurov before or during his VGIK student years for the regional TV of Gorki. He does not consider it a part of his filmography. For its creators, it was just a TV program, and the people who worked on it most often were being given no distinction in the credits. This...
In 1994, Alexander Sokurov accompanied Russian troops assigned to a frontier military post at the Tajikistan/Afghanistan border to film their experiences. While unnamed tribal forces occasionally engaged the troops in skirmishes, Sokurov’s haunting documentary chronicles the downtime between...
A Humble Life is certainly true to its title, a documentary study of the day-to-day world of Umeno Mathuyoshi, an old woman who lives in an isolated mountain house in the Nara prefecture in Japan.
Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the...
A surreal journey of a displaced spirit as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they...
Aleksander Sokurov brings the treasures of the Hermitage back into the light by making films about artists and their paintings. He has chosen the painter Hubert Robert, who spent a long time in Italy, and whose preference was for creating ancient ruined landscapes and naturalistic portrayals of...
The life and work of the great Russian composer Dmitriy Shostakovich is presented in this documentary through rare images and audios from many archives, at one time censored by the Soviet government. A brief take on his life, from his transition as an early prodigy to a first rate artist, his...
The manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as a gathering of tired participants of a mass scene falling into pieces without the director's orders and without any aims.
