Aleksandr Sokurov

Father and Son explores the intricate dynamics of familial relations and the profound, ambiguous nature of love and loss between inextricably linked souls. (Wellspring Media)

Told in one fluid shot, a tale which floats like a dreamlike journey through the majestic spaces of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, engaging real and imagined characters from Russian and European history. The nameless protagonist, a 19th-century French diplomat, guides the audience through a lost, sumptuous dream that was the Enlightenment period. The film, staged among some of the Western Art tradition's greatest masterpieces, climaxes in a pageant of color, motion, and music... (imdb)

In 1942, in Bavaria, Eva Braun (Yelena Rufanova) is alone, when Adolf Hitler (Leonid Mozgovoy) arrives with Dr. Josef Goebbels (Leonid Sokol) and his wife Magda Goebbels (imdb)

A slow and poignant story of love and patience told via a dying mother nursed by her devoted son. The simple narrative is a thread woven among the deeply spiritual images of the countryside and cottage. (imdb)

This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov (Alexei Ananishov), a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia, which is on the Caspian Sea. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania. (MSN Movies)

As Japan nears defeat at the end of World War II, Emperor Hirohito starts his day in a bunker underneath the Imperial Palace in Toyko. A servant reads to him a list of activities for the day, including a meeting with his ministers, marine biology research, and writing his son. Hirohito muses about the impact on such schedules when the Americans arrive but is told that as long as there is a solitary Japanese person living, the Americans will not reach The Emperor... (imdb)

An elderly woman takes a train trip to visit her grandson at his army camp inside Chechnya. (imdb)

It starts in Russia where the narrator (who is only seen as a shade, but seems to be Sokurov) passes through a town while remembering its inhabitants' intense fear of death. Next he observes a baptism in the company of a monk. He wonders why Jesus did not beg to be crucified, as this was his destination. He seems to ask: How could the world be redeemed if even God is afraid of death? (IMDB Comments)

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. (imdb)

A 1988 documentary film directed by Alexander Sokurov about the later life and death of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (Wikipedia)

Made in 1977, and only finally released in 1987, this is Sokurov's first feature-length film. Extraordinarily beautiful, utilising an array of unusual stylistic devices, it seems as if Sokurov's style was fully formed from the outset. A sublime meditation on love, loneliness, life and death, it still stands as one of his finest achievements. (KG)

Aleksandr Sokurov creates a visually poetic, elegant, and unforgettable synthesis of art and life in Mariya. The lush and textural initial sequence, shot using color film, presents the austere life of the titular Mariya - a robust, genial, and hard-working middle-aged collective farmer with an engaging smile - during an arduous flax harvest season in the summer of 1975. (KG)

In this film the long train of photos of the Soviet leaders, dead or alive, stops at the portrait of Yeltsin. At the time of shooting Yeltsin had fallen down from the assembly of the Communist Party deities, and participated in the earthly life through connections of different kinds. Family chronicle, the world of nature, panoramas of new apartment blocks and cemeteries, accidental and acute episodes of life of the ordinary people of the street form the epic picture of a universal existence. (Alexandra Tuchinskaya)

Sonata for Hitler could broadly be described as an experimental piece although Sokurov is very clear about distancing himself from avant-garde filmmakers. Perhaps because of his early experiences of censorship, Sokurov is famously reticent about the concrete meanings to his films and has often been quoted as saying (of cinema) 'too much importance is put on words'. 'Impressions' are what have remained important in Sokurov's work. (www.cinema16.org)

Taurus is a veiled, imaginatively speculative account of the last days of Vladimir Lenin. It is the second work in a planned tetrology of films focusing on the personal side of men in power in the 20th century. (rusfilm.pitt.edu)

"Oriental Elegy" is the first piece of the Japanese video cycle, the creation of which is still going on. The genre of this cycle can hardly be considered as documentary; perhaps only because the real people are represented there in their normal conditions and surroundings. (www.kinoglaz.fr)

Haunting black-and-white meditation on themes from 19th-century Russian literature, most conspicuously "Crime and Punishment." (nytimes)

Director Aleksandr Sokurov speaks with novelist and essayist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a series of engaging and thought-provoking interviews.

The action in this lavishly produced film takes place at an oddly ark-shaped mansion during World War I. A large group of family and friends have gathered at this country house to dance, drink, and converse. Their conversation, in particular, is adorned with erudite literary references and quotations. Despite their apparent refinement, their preoccupations are simple: sex and violence. Disquieting images break the tranquility of the vacationers' inappropriate idyll. (allmovie.com)

This film is a contemplative report on an ancient, solitary house lost in the remote mountains of the village of Aska, in Japan. (uol.com.br)

Aleksander Sokurov brings the treasures of the Hermitage back into the light by making films about artists and their paintings. He has chosen the painter Hubert Robert, who spent a long time in Italy, and whose preference was for creating ancient ruined landscapes and naturalistic portrayals of times past.

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

A paralyzed woman attempts to call her husband at work but hears only the sound of other voices.

A documentary film about the agricultural development in the region of Gorky: the everyday life in a sovkhoz, the building of a reservoir and of a greenhouse. (imdb)

Sokurov uses "Madame Bovary" as his inspiration, and transforms hidden desires and longing of the protagonist into metaphysical beauty.

A version of the German legend in which a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge. (imdb)

In 1994, Sokurov accompanied Russian troops assigned to a frontier military post at the Tajikistan/Afghanistan border to film their experiences. Though Russia had pulled out of its war with Afghanistan in 1989, a shadowy enemy still dogs the Russian troops along the border. While unnamed tribal forces occasionally engage the troops in skirmishes, Sokurov's haunting documentary actually chronicles the down time between activity. (amazon.com)

Employing the flow and fugitive feeling of a half-remembered reverie--full of mysteries, portents, inexplicable happenings, and chimerical objects--the film, set in the Chekhov Museum, centers on the relationship between a young museum guard and an older visitor who seems at different times to be a lover, a doctor, or a surrogate father. (hcl.harvard.edu)

A history of the Louvre during the Nazi occupation and a meditation on the meaning and timelessness of art. (imdb)

Originally a five-part semi-documentary series on Russian television, this scaled down release tells the story of a Russian naval commander in charge of an Arctic-based ship. The film reveals the daily duties associated with the ship, but it is really about solitude and isolation. Voice-over narration by the commander, other sailors, and even a third-person voice provide the "confession" of the title.

Documentary about the second world war

A portrait of the widow of writer Toshio Shimao, living on an isolated island with her disabled daughter, shunning comforts and other company (www.imdb.com).

The Degraded is the second film by Alexander Sokurov. It was released in 1980 and is of 30 minutes duration. (wikipedia.org)

These images and sounds are poetic metaphors that transform “Elegy from Russia” into a document that provides a emotional–historical “memory bank” for all.

Russian singer Fyodor Chaliapin is interred in a Moscow cemetery, and his 3 daughters visit his Leningrad house, after which the film shows us the old USSR the artist abandoned in 1922, some say betrayed, to seek a better life in Paris (imdb.com).

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

Made up of footage of a protest manifestation of mothers whose children had been summoned to serve in Soviet military forces and sent to the zones of Transcaucasian conflicts. (imdb)

A document on the daily life of an ordinary collective farm of the U.S.S.R. in 1978 : the hard-working people who love their work just because they are brought up to do so, almost with no rewards from life, in an atmosphere contaminated with official rhetoric. (Letterboxd)

The second film by Sokurov featuring Boris Yeltsin as the principal character. Now he is the President of Russia, invested with power, bearing the full responsibility for the destinies of his distant compatriots as well as his closest kin and friends. (Letterboxd)

A documentary film about the Russian director Sergei Kosintsev.