Fairytale

Sokurov uses archival footage, setting them adrift in a liminal realm of collapsing ruins and misted forests. In this suspended netherworld, these figures, or multiple versions of themselves, mutter petty obsessions: body odor, sartorial regrets, banal gossip, their monumental crimes conspicuously absent. They demand entrance to heaven, to which God replies only “soon.” Their endless waiting becomes both absurd and haunting, a meditation on power emptied of meaning, the grotesque revealed in whisper not roar. Visually hypnotic and morally provocative, Fairytale is Sokurov’s most surreal exploration yet of tyranny’s residue, where absence and repetition become the only architecture of memory.

Director’s Statement:

In Fairytale, I sought to dissolve the grandeur of history into the silence of limbo. Here, these figures of enormity wander with their petty grievances, endlessly looping gestures of vanity. Trapped between oblivion and remembrance, they become the muted ghosts of our memory—scraps of power now faded. And in that hovering in-between, their absurdity speaks clearer than any speech. It is there, in that silence, I listen.