Director & scriptwriter Alexander Sokurov

Camera Alexander Burov

Design Sergey Debizhev

Music Pavel Chesnokov

Production Leningrad Studio of Documentary Films

Alexander Sokurov shows the official manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as the underside of official chronicle footage. The parade of people’s unity he shows as a gathering of tired extras falling into pieces without the director’s orders and without any aims. A part instead of the whole, individual instead of common, a symbol growing up from details are the postulates of Eisenstein’s Soviet cinema of editing. Sokurov revises them in the context of our time. Faces are separate and lonely even in the prescribed general rejoicing. Sokurov adds a church canticle to the closing soundtrack. It is an evening Orthodox prayer of repentance.

 

* FIPRESCI Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival (1987)

* Special Andrey Tarkovsky Memorial Prize (1987)