Yuriy Arabov

In 1942, in Bavaria, Eva Braun (Yelena Rufanova) is alone, when Adolf Hitler (Leonid Mozgovoy) arrives with Dr. Josef Goebbels (Leonid Sokol) and his wife Magda Goebbels (imdb)

A slow and poignant story of love and patience told via a dying mother nursed by her devoted son. The simple narrative is a thread woven among the deeply spiritual images of the countryside and cottage. (imdb)

This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov (Alexei Ananishov), a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia, which is on the Caspian Sea. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania. (MSN Movies)

As Japan nears defeat at the end of World War II, Emperor Hirohito starts his day in a bunker underneath the Imperial Palace in Toyko. A servant reads to him a list of activities for the day, including a meeting with his ministers, marine biology research, and writing his son. Hirohito muses about the impact on such schedules when the Americans arrive but is told that as long as there is a solitary Japanese person living, the Americans will not reach The Emperor... (imdb)

A man tries to come to terms with his father's death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality. (imdb)

Made in 1977, and only finally released in 1987, this is Sokurov's first feature-length film. Extraordinarily beautiful, utilising an array of unusual stylistic devices, it seems as if Sokurov's style was fully formed from the outset. A sublime meditation on love, loneliness, life and death, it still stands as one of his finest achievements. (KG)

Taurus is a veiled, imaginatively speculative account of the last days of Vladimir Lenin. It is the second work in a planned tetrology of films focusing on the personal side of men in power in the 20th century. (rusfilm.pitt.edu)

A semi-fictional account of Russian poets Josef Brodsky, who was forced into American exile in 1972. (imdb)

The action in this lavishly produced film takes place at an oddly ark-shaped mansion during World War I. A large group of family and friends have gathered at this country house to dance, drink, and converse. Their conversation, in particular, is adorned with erudite literary references and quotations. Despite their apparent refinement, their preoccupations are simple: sex and violence. Disquieting images break the tranquility of the vacationers' inappropriate idyll. (allmovie.com)

Sokurov uses "Madame Bovary" as his inspiration, and transforms hidden desires and longing of the protagonist into metaphysical beauty.

A version of the German legend in which a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge. (imdb)

The film tells the story of how Saint Alexius, the Metropolitan of Moscow, healed the Tatar Queen Taidula from blindness. (imdb)

Employing the flow and fugitive feeling of a half-remembered reverie--full of mysteries, portents, inexplicable happenings, and chimerical objects--the film, set in the Chekhov Museum, centers on the relationship between a young museum guard and an older visitor who seems at different times to be a lover, a doctor, or a surrogate father. (hcl.harvard.edu)

A mother loses her son during a winter visit to a remote town. (imdb)

A famous artist strives to find the secret of eternal life through the beautiful mannequins he creates. (imdb)

The life of a young doctor is intertwined with the fate of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. (imdb)

Fantastic story of the first half of the XIX century. In the monastery there is a new resident Ivan. But along with the monk, dark forces penetrate the monastery, which materialize in the person of the Legion. The Legion chose Ivan as the object of his diabolical work, tempting him in every possible way in order to knock off his chosen way of serving God. But the stronger the temptation, the stronger the spiritual strength of Ivan (wikipedia.org).

A cheerful grim look at the follies of the twentieth century, anchored in Gogol's proto-surrealist novella 'The Nose' and Shostakovich's opera of the same name.