28/08/2025 - VENICE 2025: Aleksandr Sokurov returns with a provocative work recounting the late 20th century in Russia and elsewhere, that’s somewhere between a rolling TV news broadcast and installation art

Travelling from 1957 to 1991 takes 34 years in real time, but Aleksandr Sokurov in Director’s Diary makes an impressive go of getting us there in just five hours. A work both simple and capaciously epic that’s not quite a “diary film” in the orthodox documentary sense, nor a longitudinal study with a vast accretion of detail, it’s paradoxically pacy in its moment-to-moment rhythm and endurance-testing in overall duration – its visual appeal sometimes resembles text-driven political memes, or even those old card-based calendars with trivia factoids on each new day. It has premiered out of competition at Venice, screening bravely in full with no interval.  

If that description sounds frivolous, Sokurov has a laudably high-minded aim, chaperoning us on a personal tour through his memories of the Soviet era’s latter half, with recollections of first-hand experiences living in Russia, and what was occurring globally, doled out in perfect proportion. As ever, he has a cinematically innovative, if oddly blunt, method for conveying this: with a graph’s y-axis left-aligned on the screen, ticking down numerically from the late 1950s to the early 1990s; and with hazy, mostly black-and-white Soviet propaganda footage forming a pillow on the majority of the image for a bevy of eclectic text to flash up.

Like Adam Curtis’s last documentary series Shifty and (fittingly) Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, this text is where the main exposition lies, providing a somehow coherent sense of the passage of time and its vital events: political, scientific and – especially – cultural. There are narrative threads in these headings that are expected (various international conflicts and touchpoint moments in the Cold War), more specialised (exhaustive accounting of aviation disasters involving both Russian state and US privatised aircrafts) and winkingly eccentric, with Sokurov charting the milestones of trashy anglophone hard-rock bands like Aerosmith and Queen.

Sokurov has been branded a cultural reactionary (despite his modernist visual tendencies) by some discerning critics, yet the emphasis on world geopolitical tensions cannily makes Director’s Diary a prelude to and explanation for the present, as much as a requiem for lost time. Undercut with cheery audiovisual Khrushchev- and Brezhnev-era propaganda (of fawning Russian subjects, and deference to heroic icons like Lenin), we feel the doublethink involved in the Soviet-backed crushing of the Hungarian uprising and Prague Spring; the updates on Israel’s turbulent early years also betray his stance on the ongoing Gaza war. The UK’s Margaret Thatcher, from the other end of the continent, is clearly loathed, but we feel Sokurov nervily sympathising as she sounds caution on Europe hastily “reunifying”. Our present and future hover over the hauntological assemblage he creates – a further palimpsest.

With this review dedicated so much to description, it raises the question of how essential Director’s Diary is to make time for, and how it will potentially travel after Venice. There’s so much else, long and short, to watch – not least Sokurov’s arguably more essential turn-of-the-millennium work – and the ratio of data points we’re only reminded of, compared to what we truly learn, isn’t encouraging. Otherwise, it’s a fitting epilogue to Sokurov’s career project of rendering the darkest corners and figures of history, and with its “diary” conceit, it’s a clearer conduit to what he actually believes.

Director’s Diary is a co-production by Italy and Russia, staged by Aleksandr Sokurov’s own “Example of Intonation” Foundation, Revolver and Bielle Re. Its international sales are overseen by Films Boutique.