When Alexander Sokurov's film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, a few critics took the Russian filmmaker to task for delivering what they saw as an apologia for Russia's brutal military incursion into Chechnya in the last decade of the 20th century. In crafting a dreamy, atmospheric film depicting the conscripts as simply bored, directionless young men, the detractors said, he ignored the atrocities the Russian army inflicted on the Chechen population during those years of terror.
How wrong they were. While hardly a polemic, Alexandra is probably Sokurov's most political film in recent years, and it's an anti-war piece too. As the film follows the wanderings of a grandmother (played by opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, above) around army camps where her grandson is stationed and Chechnya's wastelands and bombed-out cities, it offers a moving reflection of how wars scar the land and its people. And as Alexandra befriends a Chechen pensioner and joins her for tea in her dilapidated apartment, the film's melancholy about the state of Russia is clear for all to see. Just like many Hollywood films that look at how the misguided venture into Iraq twisted the American psyche, Alexandra is as effective - if not more so - in showing the matter-of-fact destruction of everyday life in a devastated country. May 21, 7.30pm; May 29, 2.30pm, Arts Centre.
