At the closing ceremony of the 48th Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF), the special award “For Contribution to World Cinema”, which director Alexander Sokurov was expected to receive, was not handed out. About this I mentioned “Kommersant”.
Earlier on April 14, director Lyubov Arkus said Sokurov received a letter from MIFF president Nikita Mikhalkov. On her channel on Telegram She posted a photo of the message Signed by Mikhalkov. She said that Sokurov was invited to attend the closing ceremony of the festival, where he will receive an award “for contribution to world cinema.”
According to Kommersant, neither Sokurov nor Mikhalkov participated in the closing ceremony of the MIFF festival. The festival’s president was also not present at the opening ceremony on April 16. Meanwhile, at the Moscow International Film Festival, there was a special screening of Sokurov’s five-hour documentary “Director’s Notebook”, dedicated to the history of Russia from 1961 to 1995. The film’s premiere took place last year at the Venice Film Festival; It has never been shown before in Russia. In Moscow, Sokurov personally presented the film.
In conversation with the publication “Rise” Sokurov He saidThe award was “cancelled”, but no one explained the reason for that.
“Well, what can I say? Well, first we decided, and then we changed our minds. This is very familiar to us, actually. I’m not very enthusiastic about this situation, to be honest. You never know what happens. Well, they decided this way, and then they decided differently. Who am I to explain myself to? Yes, it’s all nonsense. We don’t work for awards, we make films because we have to make films, and the fact that this happens is, well, impolite. “Well, impudent,” said the director. Rude, but God bless him, let these be their internal problems.”
He also noted that Mikhalkov did not contact him after the invitation to the closing ceremony of the MIFF festival.
to update. In her channel on Telegram Sokurova later He said“, that at MIFF, during the screening of his film “Director’s Notebook”, the director of the festival program gave a letter addressed to Mikhalkov, “with a proposal to pay attention to the situation in Russian cinema. “On the eve of the premiere of our film, I received confirmation of my assumptions – the award ceremony was cancelled. Well, if it’s cancelled, it’s cancelled. My job is to work in films,” the director said.
Lyubov Arkus also claimed in her post that film centers in St. Petersburg, including Aurora and Rodina, had refused to show a major retrospective of Sokurov’s films on the occasion of his anniversary. According to her, the director is “blacklisted.”
In October 2023, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation refused to issue a distribution certificate for the film “The Fairy Tale” by director Alexander Sokurov. The film tells how Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill meet in hell.
Alexander Sokurov is a member of the Russian Presidential Council on Human Rights. In December 2025, the director spoke at a council meeting in which Vladimir Putin participated. He said that there were fewer budget places in Russian universities because they were occupied by children of participants in the war with Ukraine, called it insulting that people were declared “foreign agents”, and also spoke about censorship in cinema and literature.