Aleksandr Sokurov

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.

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

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

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

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.

Set in the early 1920s after the end of the Russian Civil War, Red Army soldier Nikita returns to his hometown to see his partner Lyuba, both of whom are scarred by the trauma of the Russian Empire of yesteryear.

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.

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 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 through huge metal funnels.

In 1942 Bavaria, Eva is alone, when Adolf arrives with Josef, his wife Magda, and Martin to spend a couple of days without politics.

A young night watchman at the Anton Chekhov museum in Yalta encounters a mysterious, weary intruder who appears to be the playwright himself, returned from the dead. Over the course of a single night, the two share a series of quiet, existential interactions within the preserved rooms of the estate.

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 take a back seat to his bond with his dad, and breaks up with him. Aleksei is also experiencing nightmares, dreading separation from his father to be a part of the military as his father was.

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.

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

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 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.

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 earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.

This film project was made in 1996 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cinema.

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.

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.

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.

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 Hoxha at an art exhibition, her husband is arrested on trumped-up charges.

The life and work of Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky is celebrated and explored in three documentary films: Tempo Di Viaggio (1983) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, Moscow Elegy (1988) directed by Alexander Sokurov, and One Day In The Life Of Andrei Arsenevitch (2000) directed by Chris Marker.

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

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.