Movies: Aleksandr Sokurov

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....

A man tries to come to terms with his father's death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality....

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 an...

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-g...

The story of VGIK teachers and students about the acting profession....

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

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 ...

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 an...

Albania in the 1960s, the city of Gjirokastra. Katya, a graduate of the Philology Department of Moscow State University, marries an Albanian, a young historian whom she met in Moscow. Soon after Katya enters into a dialogue with the dictator Enver Ho...

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 a...

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

A documentary portrait of Miho Shimao, widow of renowned Japanese writer Toshio Shimao....

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....

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 h...

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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 ter...

Interesting short documentary on young athletes in a Soviet ice skating program, some of whom are barely past toddler age. Kinetic and up close, the doc focuses on movement with music, eschewing interview and conversation, and mostly submerging polit...

Sokurov directed and filmed Mozart’s Requiem for the Rossica Choir in the wonderful hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic....

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 fiel...

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 d...