Dmitri Shostakovich: Sonata For Viola

Director: Alexander Sokurov

This film about the great composer Dmitri Shostakovich was initially begun by the St Petersburg film-maker Semion Aranovitch. Sokurov was invited to participate in the editing of archive footage for the film. But it was Sokurov who was to create the composition of the film and defined its emotional mood. The selection and editing of the authentic documentary material took the film out of a narrow biographical framework and placed it instead in a broader historical context. Sokurov composed a tragic requiem to the destiny of the artist, whose creative work developed and found fruition, invevitably in opposition to state ideology. This is a film about the triumph of powerful art and about the defeat and death of a weak man burdened by his gift. This biography of Shostakovich, which includes the most acute moments of social life in Soviet Russia, had become the foundation for a reflection and an overview of the tragic destiny of the Artist, always alone but not separated from his epoch and his homeland.