Moscow Elegy

One of Sokurov's series of 'elegies', this is a tribute to his former mentor Andrei Tarkovsky who died in 1986. A long way removed from a conventional documentary, it is more a meditation on Tarkovsky, an attempt to capture his essence, than a chronological account of his life and work. Sokurov visits Tarkovsky's one-time Moscow apartment and speculates on why he went into exile and what his legacy is to Russian cinema. The style is deliberately subjective and impressionistic. It's fascinating to see the footage from an old Soviet propaganda feature in which Tarkovsky acted as a very young man, and to watch him at work on the set of his final film, The Sacrifice.