Soviet Elegy

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The reburial of great Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin from Les Batignolles cemetery in Paris to Novo–Devitchye cemetery in Moscow. The daughters from Chaliapin’s second marriage travel to the Soviet Union for the ceremony.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.