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Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov (Template:Lang-ru) (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.

Career

Sokurov was born in Siberia into a military officer's family. 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 friendship 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".

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, with four of his movies having debuted there. 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.

Filmography

Fiction films

• The Degraded (Разжалованный, 1980)
• Painful Indifference (Скорбное бесчувствие, 1983–1987)
• Empire (Ампир, 1986)
• Days of Eclipse (Дни затмения, 1988)
• Save and Protect (Спаси и сохрани, 1989)
• The Second Circle (Круг второй, 1990)
• Stone (Камень, 1992)
• Whispering Pages (Тихие страницы, 1993)
• Mother and Son (Мать и сын, 1996)
• Moloch (Молох, 1999)
• Taurus (Телец, 2000)
• Russian Ark (Русский ковчег, 2002)
• Father and Son (Отец и сын, 2003)
• The Sun (Солнце, 2004)
• Alexandra (Александра, 2007)
• Two Brothers and a Sister (TBC)
• Faust (TBC)

Documentaries

• Maria (Peasant Elegy) (1978–1988)
• Sonata for Hitler (1979–1989)
• Sonata for Viola. Dmitri Shostakovitch (1981)
• And Nothing More (1982–1987)
• Evening Sacrifice (1984–1987)
• Patience of Labour (1985–1987)
• Elegy (1986)
• Moscow Elegy (1986–1988)
• Petersburg Elegy (1990)
• Soviet Elegy (1990)
• To The Events In Transcaucasia (1990)
• A Simple Elegy (1990)
• A Retrospection of Leningrad (1957–1990) (1990)
• An Example of Intonation (1991)
• Elegy from Russia (1992)
• Soldier's Dream (1995)
• Spiritual Voices (1995)
• Oriental Elegy (1996)
• Hubert Robert. A Fortunate Life (1996)
• A Humble Life (1997)
• The St. Petersburg Diary: Inauguration of a monument to Dostoevsky (1997)
• The St. Petersburg Diary: Kosintsev's Flat (1998)
• Confession (1998)
• The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn (1998)
• dolce… (1999)
• Elegy of a Voyage (2001)
• The St. Petersburg Diary: Mozart. Requiem (2004)
• Elegy of a life: Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya (2006)

External links

• Sokurov's home page
• Alexander Sokurov at IMDb
• The Island of Sokurov Stephen M. Norris, Russia Beyond the Headlines, 23 December 2009

• Soviet film directors
• 1951 births
• Living people
• Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography alumni
• Russian film directors
• People from Irkutsk Oblast