3 new titles in the Alexander Sokurov DVD collection

Following the acclaimed first batch(Confessions, Spiritual Voices and Sonata For Viola, Ideale Audience International is proud to announce the imminent release of three new titles in the Alexander Sokurov DVD collection : Elegy Of A Voyage, Elegy Of The Land and Moscow Elegy :

ELEGY OF THE LAND:

Maria – Last Day of a Rainy Summer

Elegy of the Land presents two films by Alexander Sokurov, the earliest work from the filmmaker that was allowed to be made public.

A requiem in memory of a Russian peasant woman, MARIA starts as a colourful summer impression of Maria Voinova, who grew flax all her life. The audience is plunged into a pastoral atmosphere as we see her haymaking, harvesting, bathing in the river, working in the flax fields, and holidaying at a Black Sea resort. Several years later, Maria died tragically. The film crew returned to the village of Vedenino some months after her death. Everything there had changed…

LAST DAY OF A RAINY SUMMER documents the daily life of an ordinary collective farm of the U.S.S.R. in 1978 : the hard-working people who love their work just because they are brought up to do so, almost with no rewards from life, in an atmosphere contaminated with official rhetoric.

ELEGY OF A VOYAGE/

HUBERT ROBERT, A FORTUNATE LIFE

ELEGY OF A VOYAGE tells the story of a man, who embarks alone on a dark journey across vast snow-covered spaces, boundaries border-crossings and a sea to arrive in a foreign country. In a highly-industrialised area, he is carried away into a stream of traffic. He chronicles in detail what he sees, those he meets - all that lights his path.

He eventually arrives at the doors of a palace that seems almost abandoned, and enters a ghostly museum. In the moonlight, the traveller discovers the goal of his voyage: A painting by Peter Saenredam, : "St. Mary's Square", painted by the artist in his presence… in the 17th century.

HUBERT ROBERT, A FORTUNATE LIFE is a stylistic portrait of the 18th century French painter, based on his paintings exhibited in Saint Petersburg’s beautiful Hermitage Museum.

BONUS : Interview with Alexander Sokurov - DVD-ROM section with editor’s notes, biography and filmography – Scene selection.

MOSCOW ELEGY

Moscow Elegy is part of the Elegy series, created by our team at the Leningrad State Documentary Productions, LSDF. The films in this series have in common an "elegiac mood"… Moscow Elegy was originally intended to mark Andreii Tarkovsky’s 50th birthday. But disagreements within the Soviet Professional Union of Cinematographers about the style and content of the film forced us to suspend production for a long time and the film was only completed after his death. This "birthday gift" was to be a dramatic event in my cinema career.

The film is a subjective perception of the personality of the great film-maker and his destiny in the context of History. Let me add that our task was to create a special human approach towards the memory and personality of Tarkovsky. We attempted to treat the footage in a tender and caring way, with kindness. We were not trying to embrace all aspects of Tarkovsky's life and work. We are speaking only about what he has left in his Motherland, and what was going on during those years in the West, where he had had to work.

Alexander Sokurov