Mother and Son

Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov

Release Year: 1997
Running time: 72
Country: Russia
Language: Russian w/English subt.
Genres:
$24.95 - Classroom Rights
$349.00 - With PPR
$499.00 - With DSL
$499.00 - With DSL and PPR
MSRP: $599.00
Directed by: Aleksandr Sokurov

A miracle of sound, light and characterization, Mother and Son achieves a pinnacle of film lyricism rarely, if ever, achieved before. Using stained glass, mirror effects and special lenses, director Aleksandr Sokurov (Russian Ark) and cameraman Aleksei Fyodorov have created "one of the most painterly features of all times" (The Boston Phoenix). Both revolutionary in form and deeply reverent in theme, this intimate elegy is a truly unique film experience of universal relevance and hypnotic vision.

Within a small cabin cloistered in a netherworld as idyllic as a dream, an ailing mother (Gudrun Geyer) and her grown son (Aleksei Ananishnov) play out a muted drama "so elemental, so primal and rudimentary, it's part of our genetic code" (The Boston Herald). "I'm a head person, otherwise my heart would break," confesses the son as his mother's life ebbs away. But as the dutiful son comforts his dying mother in her final hours, and the shadow of mortality consumes her, heartbreak is inevitable. "Visuals that make Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven look like a home movie" (Time Out New York) herald both anguished solitude and the arbitrary grace of survival.

Kino is proud to make Mother and Son available on US DVD. Hailed as a modern masterpiece, "one of those rare works that extends the art of film" (The New York Daily News), it has been championed by rhapsodic admirers as varied as critic Susan Sontag, director Paul Schrader and musician Nick Cave. "Watching it," said J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, "is like watching the last sunset."

Reviews

"One of the year's ten best" -- The Village Voice

"Lyrical, intense, mesmerizing. Sokurov brings the eye of a masterly painter and the sensitivity of a poet to the deepest and most complex of human relationships." -- Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York Times

"(four stars) One of those rare works that extends the art of film, suggesting for all its melancholy that movies do have a future." -- Dave Kehr, New York Daily News