Watch Russian Ark Videos

Release Date: 2002

Cast: Aleksandr Chaban, Valery Gergiev, Maksim Sergeyev, Mariya Kuznetsova, Sergei Dontsov, Leonid Mosgovoi, Mikhail Piotrovski, Anna Aleksakhina, Alexander Sokurov, David Giorgobiani, Vladimir Baranov

Categories: Movies, Drama Film, Experimental Film, Essay Film, Fantasy, History, Avant-Garde, Mystery

Russian Ark (Russian: Русский ковчег Transliteration: Russkij Kovcheg) is a 2002 Russian historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. It was filmed entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum using a single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot. The film was entered into the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. An unnamed narrator (unseen by the audience and voiced by the director) wanders through the Winter Palace (now the main building of Russian State Hermitage Museum) in Saint Petersburg. The narrator implies that he has died in some horrible accident and... MORE

Russian Ark (Russian: Русский ковчег Transliteration: Russkij Kovcheg) is a 2002 Russian historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. It was filmed entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum using a single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot. The film was entered into the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. An unnamed narrator (unseen by the audience and voiced by the director) wanders through the Winter Palace (now the main building of Russian State Hermitage Museum) in Saint Petersburg. The narrator implies that he has died in some horrible accident and is a ghost drifting through the palace. In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various time periods in the city's three-hundred-year history. He is accompanied by "the European" (played by Sergei Dreiden), who represents the nineteenth-century French traveller the Marquis de Custine. (The fourth wall is repeatedly broken and re-erected; at times the narrator-director and the companion interact freely with the other performers, and at other times, they go completely unnoticed.) On a winter's day, a small party of men and women arrive by horse-drawn carriage to a minor, side entrance LESS