Mother and Son

Mat i syn

Russia

1997

79 Min

Color

1.66:1

Russian

Subtitled in English

Audio in Russian

Currently 4.1/5 Stars.
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CAST Gudrun Geyer, Aleksei Ananishnov

PROD DES Vera Zelinskaya, Esther Ritterbusch

SOUND Martin Steyer, Vladimir Persov

Berlinale (Forum), New York

Synopsis

Alexander Sokurov’s extraordinarily lyrical film is a beautiful and tender ex-ploration of the deep affection between an ailing mother and her devoted adult son. Set in a hauntingly beautiful landscape which Sokurov’s camera transforms into stunning cinematic canvases, the pair recall happier times as the dutiful son lovingly nurses his ailing mother in her final hours. The first part in a proposed trilogy about familial bonds that continues with the captivating Father and Son, Mother and Son is an emotional and poetic masterpiece of unique vision.

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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