Alexander Sokurov’s new documentary, Director’s Notebook, was screened out of competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. The film runs for five hours with a 15-minute intermission and is assembled from Soviet newsreels, archival footage, and excerpts from television films and broadcasts from 1957 to 1991.
Film critic Irina Karpova writes that the picture is structured like a kind of book: meaning emerges not only from editing but also from the interaction between the image and the text that appears on screen. According to cinematographer and editor Alexander Zolotukhin, the filmmakers wanted to test a new way of organizing cinematic material. The text sometimes supplements the image, sometimes contradicts it, and sometimes creates deliberate dissonance.
The on-screen notes list disasters, births, deaths, film premieres, and political events. Among the references are the death of Sibelius, the births of Natalia Estemirova, Alexei Balabanov, and Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as the films The Key That Should Not Be Handed On, The Ascent, Empire of Passion, and Man of Marble. At the same time, the article notes that the film leaves out 1986 and the Chernobyl disaster.
“How was this film created? By my whole life... And this is the first film of mine in which I am a direct participant in all the events we see on the screen,” Sokurov said at a press conference.
The director said he sees the work not as a diary and not as an analysis, but as a set of notes and an attempt at synthesis. In his view, the film returns to questions that emerged in the 1950s and, he argues, remain unresolved: from disarmament and nuclear weapons to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Venice screening also prompted debate about Sokurov’s position on the war in Ukraine and about the Russian flag flying over the Lido during days of massive strikes on Ukrainian cities. Sokurov said the film was financed by private investors, thanked the Biennale leadership, and remarked in an interview that not only Russia but Europe must also change. He then cited Andrei Gromyko, saying that ten years of negotiations are better than one day of war.
Sokurov also said that “politicians and officials determine most of society’s life,” while millions of people are absorbed in ordinary existence and often do not notice the decisions made above them. In the film, built from archive material from the Leningrad Documentary Film Studio, that distance between politics and people’s lives becomes one of its central themes.