Movies: Aleksandr Sokurov

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...

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 a...

Amateur actors read stories from a book describing the 900-day siege of Leningrad during World War II....

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...

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....

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

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

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...

This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earli...

A documentary film about the work of Dinara Asanova, director at the Lenfilm film studio....

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...

In this dreamlike film, a nameless father and his son, Aleksei, live together in an apartment in St. Petersburg. Aleksei's mother has died and consequently the two have a very close relationship. When Aleksei acquires a girlfriend, she refuses to tak...

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 ...

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....

A teenage soldier in World War I—a simple village boy with a naive youthful dream of fame and medals—throws himself into the unknown and goes blind in the first battle, thus taking on a new job: intercepting enemy planes by listening to the air throu...

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....

A man goes for a walk through the countryside with his dying mother....

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 ...

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....

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 opera...