Alexandra

Aleksandra

France, Russia

2007

95 Min

Color

1.85:1

Russian

Subtitled in English

Audio in Russian

Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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PROD Laurent Danielou, Andrei Sigle

CAST Galina Vichnevskaya, Vasily Shevtsov, Raissa Gichaeva

SOUND Vladimir Persov

Cannes (In Competition), London (Film on the Square), New York, AFI FEST (World Cinema), Toronto (Masters), São Paulo, Rotterdam (Kings & Aces), San Francisco (World Cinema)

Synopsis

The Chechen Republic, present day. A Russian troop encampment. Alexandra Nikolaevna is a grandmother who has come to see her grandson, one of the best officers in his unit. She will spend a few days here, and will discover a new world. In this male world there are no women, there is no warmth or comfort. Daily life is miserable, people don’t express their feelings here. Or maybe there simply isn’t time or energy for feelings. Every day and every hour, questions of life and death are decided here. And yet people still live in this place, human life continues. World famous singer Galina Vishnevskaya stars in Sokurov’s vision of war in Chechenia.

Director

Aleksandr Sokurov

Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Соку́ров) (b. June 14, 1951, Podorwikha, Irkutsk Oblast) is a Russian filmmaker from St Petersburg who has been hailed as successor to renowned director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Sokurov was born in Siberia in the officer’s family on June 14, 1951. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he made friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his Mirror.

Most of Sokurov’s early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev’s flat in St Petersburg.

Mother and Son (1996) was his first internationally acclaimed feature film. It was mirrored by Father and Son (2003) which baffled the critics with its implicit homoeroticism (though Sokurov himself has criticized… read more

Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Соку́ров) (b. June 14, 1951, Podorwikha, Irkutsk Oblast) is a Russian filmmaker from St Petersburg who has been hailed as successor to renowned director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Sokurov was born in Siberia in the officer’s family on June 14, 1951. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he made friends with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his Mirror.

Most of Sokurov’s early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev’s flat in St Petersburg.

Mother and Son (1996) was his first internationally acclaimed feature film. It was mirrored by Father and Son (2003) which baffled the critics with its implicit homoeroticism (though Sokurov himself has criticized this particular interpretation. In the Wellspring DVD release, critic Armond White cited Sokurov’s defense of the film against charges that it is “homoerotic.” White explicated Sokurov’s artistic and spiritual style, noting “To accept Sokurov’s images without fear or limitation—to think love not smut—points lust in the direction of progress.”[citation needed]. Sokurov has also filmed the first three installments of a planned tetralogy on prominent 20th-century rulers: Moloch (1999) about Hitler, Taurus (2000) about Lenin, and The Sun (2004) about Emperor Hirohito.

Sokurov is a Cannes Film Festival regular, four of his movies having debuted there one by one. Although he has been somewhat reluctant to cast accomplished actors in his features,[citation needed] the Russian Film Academy awarded several Nika Awards to him. His most commercially and critically successful effort to date has been a semi-documentary Russian Ark (2002), acclaimed primarily for its visually hypnotic images and single, unedited, shot.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Sokurov)

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