Aleksandr Sokurov

A portrait of Naum Kleiman — film scholar, historian, and sage. In conversation with him, a vast cultural landscape unfolds, where Pushkin meets Godard, Sokurov, Dionysius, Eisenstein, Snyders, Glass, Ozu, and many others. Kleiman reveals the simplicity of mystery, and in doing so, reveals himself.

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From 1961 to 1995, Alexander Sokurov kept a personal diary, recording both important events and everyday trivia. Now these candid recordings are taking on a new life in a large-scale five-hour documentary, intertwined with footage from iconic films of that era. This is not just the autobiography of a famous director, but a personal look at the history of the second half of the 20th century, full of reflections and observations.

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A documentary grotesque in which even the walls speak. Famous directors of St. Petersburg cinema recall their lives and work, and images of old films come to life to remind the viewer of themselves.

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Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.

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Five years in the making, based on six lengthy interviews filmed on six different locations in Saint Petersburg, we meet an outspoken artist who covers here his entire life and prolific career. The locations were Sokurov’s own favourites, where he felt at home.

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Yekaterinburg, Russia, July 17th, 1917. Czar Nicholas II Romanov and his entire family are brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks. This tragic event puts an end to the long dynasty that had ruled the country with an iron hand since the coronation of Michael I Romanov in 1613.

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Documentary film from the set of Igor Olshansky’s debut short film “Easter”. Igor Olshansky is a participant of Alexander Sokurov’s programme “Example of Intonation”, a non-commercial film support foundation.

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The film is dedicated to the life and work of the Russian director, who deservedly received worldwide recognition due to his incredible talent

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Agnès Varda takes us on a journey of discovery as she travels the globe—from Stockholm to St. Petersburg, Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City to Los Angeles—meeting with friends, artists, and fellow filmmakers.

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Agnès Varda travels around the world to meet friends, artists and filmmakers for an expansive view of the global contemporary art scene.

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A worldwide guided tour of the greatest movies ever made and the story of international cinema through the history of cinematic innovation.

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The life stories of two elderly women living in a remote region of Kurdish Iraq.

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Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.

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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.

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The film is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

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An encounter with the great Russian film director Alexander Sokurov, which gives rise to a lot of questions about his artistic stand and the problems he touches upon and resolves in his works. The film presents the director’s thoughts about the history of cinema, about the power of the sound and image, about the past and future of cinema, accompanied by fragments from his films and various archival materials.

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Poetic portrait of a filmmaker. The famous director reflects on creativity and love. His friends and associates take part in the film: artist Vladimir Shinkarev, engineer Vladimir Nikolaev, actress Elena Kramer (Spiridonova), director, film critic Oleg Kovalov, necrorealist directors Yevgeny Yufit, Igor Bezrukov.

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A documentary about the famous musician Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya.

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Making of Russian Ark, with on camera personal views by members of the cast and crew of the major film.

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Film about the work of Ukrainian film director Kira Muratova.

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Proskurina's personal homage to her friends and mentor Alexandr Sokurov. The intimate yet objective portrait comprises frank conversations with the master and footage of the shooting of Russian Ark,

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A ghost and a French marquis wander through the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, encountering scenes from many different periods of its history.

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The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn is a two-part Russian television documentary by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The documentary shot in Solzhenitsyn’s home shows his everyday life and covers his reflections on Russian history and literature.

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The second film of Alexander Sokurov's documentary series "Petersburg Diary" is dedicated to the outstanding Soviet film director Grigory Kozintsev

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A documentary film about the Russian director Sergei Kosintsev.

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Petersburg Diary - Opening of the monument to Dostoevsky

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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 times past. He was successful with the wealthy, who bought his works from him. The camera pans across the paintings while Sokurov speaks of a happy era, when the artist was at one with the spirit of the times, and agreed with the taste of his clients. Just how far removed from us this is, is shown by pictures of a "Nô" performance which are inter-cut on the screen. No words are necessary to describe what everybody knows today.

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Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov talks with the young director of independent experimental cinema Edward Shelganov.

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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 recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness.

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This small film came out of the material edited for Sokurov's five-hour documentary Spiritual Voices.

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The second film by Sokurov featuring Boris Yeltsin as the principal character. Now he is the President of Russia, invested with power, bearing the full responsibility for the destinies of his distant compatriots as well as his closest kin and friends.

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The office of the President of Lithuania, 1990. Inside, silence reigns, contrasting to the shouting of the crowds outside the windows of the governmental building. At the same time, this silence is mirrored by the intense silence of several women, whose faces remain on the screen for a long time. The silence is broken by music. The President plays the piano.

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A montage of Leningrad newsreel becomes a composite collage made up of documents-shots, divided in 16 parts, presenting the author's point of view on Russia and modern times. In the title, Sokurov appears as 'compiler' and the selection of the documents is just like an artistic process.

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In "The Soviet Elegy" the long train of photos of the Soviet leaders, dead or alive, stops at the portrait of Yeltsin. At the time of shooting Yeltsin had fallen down from the assembly of the Communist Party deities, and participated in the earthly life through connections of different kinds.

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The story about the life of Shaliapin’s family, and an emotional generalization of the life of people in modern Leningrad.

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From 1961 to 1995, Alexander Sokurov kept a personal diary, recording both important events and everyday trivia. Now these candid recordings are taking on a new life in a large-scale five-hour documentary, intertwined with footage from iconic films of that era. This is not just the autobiography of a famous director, but a personal look at the history of the second half of the 20th century, full of reflections and observations.

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A civil and artistic statement about those who determined the fate of the planet: Stalin, Churchill, Mussolini, Hitler, according to a Russian newspaper.

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A young man was born in a small Russian city, but now lives in the Caucasus, in a foreign culture. He works as a mountain guide and enjoys life, but remains a stranger among the people he lives with. He will have to leave his carelessness behind and grow up.

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1998, Nalchik. A Jewish family is in trouble: the youngest son and his bride do not come home, and in the morning, a ransom note arrives. The ransom is so high that the family is forced not only to sell its small business, but also to seek help from its fellow tribesmen.

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Video version of the dramatic dystopian performance staged by Alexander Sokurov in Vicenza, on the stage of the world's oldest theater Teatro Olimpico. The plot is based on a free interpretation of the works of I. A. Brodsky, which tells about two characters doomed to life imprisonment.

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Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.

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A doctor in early 19th-century Germany becomes infatuated with the sister of a man he unintentionally killed and bargains with the Devil incarnate to conjure their union in exchange for his soul.

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Luigi Ghirri's final project, unfortunately unrealized, was a "house of the seasons": to purchase a farmhouse, which appears in the photographer's last works, near his home in Roncocesi, and to stage exhibitions there, each linked to the current season, thus creating a close connection between natural time and artistic time. This interrupted project inspired "Pink Desert," in which the camera 'visits' a series of landscapes photographed by Ghirri according to the changing seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Nocturnal Spring. Aleksandr Sokurov narrates each season depicted in the film, focusing in narrative form on Luigi Ghirri's sense of the cyclical nature of time.

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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.

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Elderly Aleksandra visits her Russian soldier grandson, Denis, at the Chechen war front, providing comfort as she tours his army. All the while, Denis ponders the reason for her unexpected appearance.

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A documentary about the famous musician Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya.

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A re-imagination of Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power as WWII draws to a close.

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A ghost and a French marquis wander through the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, encountering scenes from many different periods of its history.

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Unfolding over two days in 1924, the film depicts the dying Lenin, world revolutionary and father of the USSR, now powerless and isolated at his Gorki estate. Cared for by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, sister Maniasha, his German doctor and several attendants, Lenin raves about his diminishing faculties, discusses the deaths of great figures (including Marx), rides a car to a picnic in a meadow and ponders his historic legacy.

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Originally aired on Russian television, this five-part semi-documentary series tells the story of a Russian naval commander in charge of an Arctic-based ship. The film provokes a meditation on solitude and isolation, while revealing the daily duties associated with the ship. Voice-over narration by the commander, other sailors, and even a third-person voice provide the “confession” of the title.

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A documentary film about the Russian director Sergei Kosintsev.

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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.

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Petersburg Diary - Opening of the monument to Dostoevsky

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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 times past. He was successful with the wealthy, who bought his works from him. The camera pans across the paintings while Sokurov speaks of a happy era, when the artist was at one with the spirit of the times, and agreed with the taste of his clients. Just how far removed from us this is, is shown by pictures of a "Nô" performance which are inter-cut on the screen. No words are necessary to describe what everybody knows today.

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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 recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness.

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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 activity.

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This small film came out of the material edited for Sokurov's five-hour documentary Spiritual Voices.

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An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat.

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These images and sounds are poetic metaphors that transform “Elegy from Russia” into a document that provides a emotional–historical “memory bank” for all.

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The second film by Sokurov featuring Boris Yeltsin as the principal character. Now he is the President of Russia, invested with power, bearing the full responsibility for the destinies of his distant compatriots as well as his closest kin and friends.

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Made up of footage of a protest manifestation of mothers whose children had been summoned to serve in Soviet military forces and sent to the zones of Transcaucasian conflicts.

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The office of the President of Lithuania, 1990. Inside, silence reigns, contrasting to the shouting of the crowds outside the windows of the governmental building. At the same time, this silence is mirrored by the intense silence of several women, whose faces remain on the screen for a long time. The silence is broken by music. The President plays the piano.

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In "The Soviet Elegy" the long train of photos of the Soviet leaders, dead or alive, stops at the portrait of Yeltsin. At the time of shooting Yeltsin had fallen down from the assembly of the Communist Party deities, and participated in the earthly life through connections of different kinds.

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As with so many early films by Sokurov, this film has two dates: the first is the date of its creation (the film was then banned), the second is the date of the final edition and legal public screening. The film consists of German and Soviet archive footage of the World War II — to be exact, from the end of the war. An attempt to make a large–scale documentary on this subject had been undertaken in the Soviet cinema of the 1960s: the film — “Ordinary Fascism” — by the outstanding Soviet film–maker Mikhail Romm had become a classic retrospective investigation of fascism. But Sokurov uses the expressive power of the documentary image in an absolutely different way. He does not amass materials for a large–scale picture of Nazi crimes.

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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 chapter, set nine years later, is in black and white and deals with how Maria Semionovna's life ended. The mood is one of a sad and elegiac narration.

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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.

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A rich woman accidently comes across a conversation on the phone about people talking about a murder.

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A 1988 documentary film directed by Alexander Sokurov, about the later life and death of Soviet Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film was originally intended to mark the 50th birthday of Tarkovsky in 1982, which would have been before his death. Controversy with Soviet authorities about the film's style and content led to significant delays in the production.

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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.

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A document on the daily life of an ordinary collective farm of the U.S.S.R. in 1978 : the hard-working people who love their work just because they are brought up to do so, almost with no rewards from life, in an atmosphere contaminated with official rhetoric.

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