Aleksandr Sokurov

Aleksandr Sokurov (b. 1951) is a Russian filmmaker and one of the last surviving members of the Soviet-era arthouse. Born in Siberia into a military family, Sokurov had a peripatetic childhood, including time spent in Turkmenistan. In 1975, he enrolled at the prestigious VGIK film school in Moscow, where he befriended Andrei Tarkovsky. Sokurov’s early works were largely banned by the Soviet censors, although he was able to produce a number of documentary shorts. During perestroika, he began to garner international acclaim with films such as the Bernard Shaw adaptation Mournful Unconcern (1987), Days of Eclipse (1988), and The Second Circle. Sokurov’s most famous feature is Russian Ark (2002), which was filmed in a single unedited shot. Other notable works include his diptych Mother and Son (1997) and Father and Son (2003), as his “tetralogy of power”: Moloch (1999), about Hitler, Taurus (2001), about Lenin, The Sun (2005) about Emperor Hirohito, and Faust (2011), a retelling of Goethe’s tragedy that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.