Maria

Mariya

Soviet Union

1988

40 Min

1.37:1

Russian

Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
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Maria is a film requiem for a Russian peasant woman, Maria Semionovna Voinova. Maria Semionovna had grown flax all her life. When she died her knowledge of working in the fields and the methods of agriculture died with her. They remain lost forever since she hadn’t been able to pass this information on to her family: her son had tragically died and her daughter refused to work in the field. In all likelihood, she would leave the farming village.
The film is in two chapters. The first chapter consists of an impression of Maria Semionovna, scenes of the colours of summer time: haymaking, bathing in a river, work in the flax fields and a holiday in the Crimea (something that happens very rarely in the life of a peasant — especially during summer). These are the impressions of someone who is a citydweller — the maker of this film. The purpose of the film is to communicate this impression to the audience, to plunge the spectators into the pastoral atmosphere. But the second half shows a bitter fate. Nine years have gone by and these years have brought changes: people have gone, people hare arrived.
The second chapter is in black and white and deals with how Maria Semionovna’s life ended. The mood is one of a sad and elegiac narration. The filmmaker intended to communicate a whole panorama of the fate of a particular person in a particular set of circumstances. —http://www.sokurov.spb.ru

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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