Islands. Alexander Sokurov

Svetlana Proskurina has directed a number of documentary portraits of prominent Russian artists – including Ernst Neizvestny and Mikhail Shemyakin – and a very personal homage to her friend and mentor, Alexander Sokurov, with whom she collaborated on Russian Ark (2002).
In her documentaries she manages to convey a remarkable degree of ease in approaching her protagonists and proximity to her subjects, partly due to the fact that the heroes of the films happen to be her personal friends. In telling their stories she unveils the history of her own friendship with these extraordinary characters, thus giving the films a very warm and intimate feel. Proskurina’s protagonists open up to her camera in a way they would not have done with any other interviewer.
‘I firmly believe that we shall never be ashamed of what we have created. I am now talking not only about myself, but also about the people who are around me, about the people who I feel close to…’, says the great Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov in the documentary devoted to his work. Proskurina interweaves Sokurov’s conversations about life and art with footage from the set of Russian Ark, showing the master at work and creating a very personal and yet objective portrait of a man whose every frame, in the words of Svetlana Proskurina, ‘contains the whole history of world cinema’. (MB)