Viktor Kossakovsky

Football seen through the eyes of some of the best directors of the world.

Open details →

Remarkable footage of a Barcelona anti-austerity demonstration – and its quelling – shaped into a lyrical tribute to the spirit of protest by Victor Kossakovsky ( ¡Vivan las Antipodas!) and 32 Spanish film students.

Open details →

The filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky on homeless people sleeping near A.T.M.’s in a bank, a growing phenomenon in Europe.

Open details →

Focus Forward: Short Films, Big Ideas is an award-winning series of 30 three-minute stories about innovators—people who are reshaping the world through act or invention—directed by the world's most celebrated documentary filmmakers.

Open details →

What would be the shortest route between Entre Rios in Argentina and the Chinese metropolis Shanghai? Simply a straight line through the center of the earth, since the two places are antipodes: they are located diametrically opposite to each other on the earth's surface. During his visits to four such antipodal pairs, the award-winning documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky captured images that turn our view of the world upside down.

Open details →

In Russian, "Svyato" means "happy". But it is also a nickname for Svyatoslav, the son of director Kossakovsky, who for two years covered mirrors from Svyato. For the first time in his life, Svyato is going to watch himself on a mirror.

Open details →

The director films the street where he lives in St. Petersburg, for a whole year, documenting the changes caused by the celebration of its 300th anniversary.

Open details →

The toddlers in a Russian playgroup are showing a striking number of adult traits. Here and there, serious romantic relationships are budding, and some tots are determined to marry. One infant may urge her friend to keep his voice low, or else the filmmakers will hear everything they say, but most pre-schoolers are undisturbed and continue their everyday activities. They play with dolls, hang around on the playground and chatter a lot, particularly about who is whose friend and who is whose lover. In this environment, the direct cinema style seems even more natural than it usually is. Two years ago, IDFA screened Victor Kossakovsky’s film Pavel and Lyalya (a Jerusalem Romance), which dealt with the profound and unselfish love of an elderly couple. In contrast, the infatuations of young kids are volatile and playful, because ten minutes later you can be married to someone else.

Open details →

Trilogy about love, experienced at different moments in life, by different people: an old couple, a young couple and two children at infant school.

Open details →

“Like the right and left hand Your soul is close to my soul We are sealed shut, blissfully and warmly, Like the right and left wing…” The life and art of Pavel Kogan and Lyudmila Stanukinas, two famous Leningrad documentary filmmakers, can best be expressed by the Tsvetaeva stanza cited above. They are the main characters of this film, which their student Viktor Kossakovsky shot during Pavel Kogan’s final months. For Lyudmila Stanukinas, Lyalya, as those close to her called her, her husband was her only reason for existence. She was with him until the end and held onto his extinguishing life as much as she could.

Open details →

Victor Kossakovsky searched obsessively for inhabitants of St. Petersburg who were born on Wednesday 19 July 1961, his own birthday, in former Leningrad. Fifty-one women and fifty men fitted the profile. In the course of time a few of these 101 people had died, others had moved to another community or abroad. But in 1995 Kossakovsky managed to capture on film all seventy remaining residents, in the street, at work or simply at home. While doing so he spent time with doctors and patients, entertainers and businessmen, construction workers and homeless people. In his unorthodox style Kossakovsky has produced a beautiful profile of people in their thirties in St. Petersburg.

Open details →

Portrait of a troubled peasant family. The film tells the story of two times widow Anna Belova who lives together with her brother Mikhail. Blending the two personalities, Kosakovsky characterizes the true Russian soul: she is the rational worker, honest and strong - he is the drunken poet, the idealist, his philosophy fades into radical nonsense time after time.

Open details →

Director Victor Kossakovsky dedicated his documentary debut to the Russian philosopher and religious thinker Alexey Fedorovich Losev (1893-1988), who died shortly after the completion of the film.

Open details →

The filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky on homeless people sleeping near A.T.M.’s in a bank, a growing phenomenon in Europe.

Open details →

What would be the shortest route between Entre Rios in Argentina and the Chinese metropolis Shanghai? Simply a straight line through the center of the earth, since the two places are antipodes: they are located diametrically opposite to each other on the earth's surface. During his visits to four such antipodal pairs, the award-winning documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky captured images that turn our view of the world upside down.

Open details →

In Russian, "Svyato" means "happy". But it is also a nickname for Svyatoslav, the son of director Kossakovsky, who for two years covered mirrors from Svyato. For the first time in his life, Svyato is going to watch himself on a mirror.

Open details →

The director films the street where he lives in St. Petersburg, for a whole year, documenting the changes caused by the celebration of its 300th anniversary.

Open details →

Trilogy about love, experienced at different moments in life, by different people: an old couple, a young couple and two children at infant school.

Open details →

“Like the right and left hand Your soul is close to my soul We are sealed shut, blissfully and warmly, Like the right and left wing…” The life and art of Pavel Kogan and Lyudmila Stanukinas, two famous Leningrad documentary filmmakers, can best be expressed by the Tsvetaeva stanza cited above. They are the main characters of this film, which their student Viktor Kossakovsky shot during Pavel Kogan’s final months. For Lyudmila Stanukinas, Lyalya, as those close to her called her, her husband was her only reason for existence. She was with him until the end and held onto his extinguishing life as much as she could.

Open details →

An insight into life in the small Russian town of Borovichi.

Open details →

Portrait of a troubled peasant family. The film tells the story of two times widow Anna Belova who lives together with her brother Mikhail. Blending the two personalities, Kosakovsky characterizes the true Russian soul: she is the rational worker, honest and strong - he is the drunken poet, the idealist, his philosophy fades into radical nonsense time after time.

Open details →

Director Victor Kossakovsky dedicated his documentary debut to the Russian philosopher and religious thinker Alexey Fedorovich Losev (1893-1988), who died shortly after the completion of the film.

Open details →