THE STORY – From 1961 to 1995, Alexander Sokurov kept a diary of major events and everyday trivia. Now transformed into a five-hour documentary with archival film footage, it becomes less autobiography than a personal lens on the second half of the 20th century.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Aleksandr Sokurov (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 305 Minutes
Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Director’s Diary” is nothing if not audacious. Spanning 34 years of global history from 1957 to 1991, the film functions less as a diary in the traditional sense and more as a monumental archival survey, a relentless chronicle of politics, culture, science, and sport. Sokurov’s cinematic notebook is filled with densely layered intertitles, contemporary newsreels, propaganda reels, and cultural ephemera, occasionally punctuated by handwritten annotations and his own muted commentary. The result is immersive but also exhausting. At five hours, “Director’s Diary” demands patience and discipline, a work better absorbed in fragments than devoured whole.
The structure is rigorously consistent and rarely deviates. Each year opens with a brief scribble in Russian script, presumably Sokurov’s hand, followed by an intertitle listing the milestones of the period. These are then illustrated by archival footage: film reels, news reports, ideological celebrations, or personal fragments. What emerges is a relentless roll call of events: scientific breakthroughs, political upheavals, Academy Awards ceremonies, births and deaths of cultural figures, and the tragic accidents that punctuate everyday life. The Soviet Union dominates as the gravitational center, with Leningrad serving as the primary visual hub, but Sokurov never neglects the wider world. He annotates developments outside the USSR with dizzying speed, adding layers of context to newsreels otherwise devoted to propaganda.
The archival material itself is extraordinary, much of it preserved in crisp black-and-white. Factories churn, workers march, parades celebrate the eternal triumph of the Soviet dream. The repetition of these images becomes hypnotic, an endless loop of smiling laborers, glowing children, and efficient policies. Yet beneath the sameness runs a darker undertone, the stasis of a society suffocated by ideology. Sokurov punctures these illusions with annotations and later glimpses of glasnost and perestroika. Suddenly, real voices emerge on screen, genuine human beings daring to speak their minds. The effect is startling, almost cathartic. After decades of enforced illusions, the mirage dissolves, but Sokurov is careful not to let triumphalism creep in. The collapse of the Soviet system is portrayed not as liberation but as the transition from one nightmare to another.
For all this richness, “Director’s Diary” is not an easy film to love. Its sheer density can overwhelm. Sokurov insists on cataloguing everything, from Nobel Prize winners to natural disasters to minor trivia, often presented with such volume that the film risks becoming something one reads more than watches. The lack of editorial breathing room or visual poetry, surprising from the filmmaker who gave us the sumptuous “Faust” and the one-take museum fantasia “Russian Ark,” makes the five-hour duration feel less like a cinematic experience than a semester-long lecture. At times, it is breathtaking in scope, at others, eye-glazing.
The experience, however, changes depending on how one approaches it. Viewed in five-year segments, the film becomes far more digestible. Taken this way, “Director’s Diary” resembles a vivid rediscovery of the Cold War era with its rhythms, its contradictions, and its repetitions. Sokurov’s gnomic voiceovers and eye for archival detail transform each segment into a miniature lesson, one that conveys what it meant to live under constant ideological surveillance. In this sense, the film achieves something remarkable. It conveys through form the suffocating sense of cultural blackout, the monotony of propaganda, and the endless parade of official optimism masking deeper despair.
Sokurov’s career has always oscillated between fiction and documentary, often blurring the line. “Russian Ark” offered a sweeping fictionalized stroll through centuries of Russian culture, “Francofonia” interwove history and memory at the Louvre, and “Fairytale” conjured dead dictators in purgatory. With “Director’s Diary,” he turns fully to historical record, stripping away narrative invention in favor of sheer accumulation. It is at once an extension of his lifelong obsession with history and an austerely new chapter in his cinematic practice.
For all its rigor, the film is best understood not as a diary but as an encyclopedia, exhaustive, maximalist, and not meant to be consumed in one sitting. Its value lies in its audacity, its refusal to simplify or sentimentalize, and its ability to reveal propaganda’s suffocating monotony alongside the unstoppable currents of global change. And while the work is deeply rooted in the Soviet past, it resonates powerfully in the present. At a time when propaganda has resurged in new digital forms, when information is manipulated and truth itself is contested, “Director’s Diary” becomes more than a historical document. It serves as a reminder of how narratives are constructed, how repetition enforces ideology, and how fragile the line can be between reality and illusion.
It is both captivating and fatiguing, demanding and rewarding, a work that resists conventional evaluation but nonetheless commands respect. To watch “Director’s Diary” is to submit to Sokurov’s stern pedagogy, to feel the weight of history pressing down as it did on those who lived through it. It may not inspire joy or catharsis, but it insists on remembrance. That insistence, in itself, makes the film vital. With “Director’s Diary,” Sokurov has created a remarkable, eye-glazing, and ambitious piece of archival cinema. It will daunt as much as it enlightens, but in measured doses it becomes a profound, if unconventional, historical essay.
