Elegy of a Voyage

The director sets out from Russia and travels by rail, by road and on a Finnish ferry to Rotterdam; the film is the record of that journey. Along the way pass misty snowscapes, cities half glimpsed and the icy swell of the night sea. The voice of the account is the director’s own, and the things he speaks of have little to do with the road itself: divinity, what time and place are in art, purpose or the lack of it, the loneliness of the soul. The journey comes to rest at the end in a museum, in front of a painting. Despite its short length the film is not a travel documentary but an essay thinking aloud. Aleksandr Sokurov’s forty seven minute Russian documentary was completed in 2009.