The film Putin didn't want you to see

Because the film industry has always been, to one degree or another, an unholy-bedfellow three-way between art, entertainment and commercial profit, the prickly kind of self-directed artist who might've thrived as a poet or painter can run the risk of facing what amounts to erasure. Sokurov belongs to this tribe. What seems like being his final work, Fairytale (2022), may end up being the greatest 21st-century film most of us will never get to see.
There was no Aleksandr Sokurov film at Cannes this year. There may never be another. The Russian will turn 74 in June, but age is not the main reason why his half-century of film-making looks to have ended abruptly.
Russia's culture ministry banned the movie from being seen in Russia, and as a result Sokurov, in December 2023, officially announced that as a result, his 'professional career… is over.' This would be a pity – Sokurov is a giant in the medium, a tireless experimenter whose films, as he's aged, have become only riskier and stranger, and have nonetheless sometimes found audiences around the world.
That 50-year career-span covers a lot of history for a Russian: from before the Brezhnev Constitution of 1977 through the Russian-Afghan War, to Gorbachev and the dissolution of the USSR, and the subsequent decades of oligarchal turmoil and territorial war-waging, most of it presided over by Vladimir Putin. (Fairytale's plight at home is like a flashback for Sokurov, all of whose films made before 1987 have two dates – completion and exhibition – since his entire 10-year output before perestroika was secreted away by the censors.)
History, the maddening fog and lingering scars of it, has always been one of Sokurov's reigning obsessions: his most famous films are the miraculous one-shot historical dream-tour Russian Ark (2002), and his plague-of-power tetralogy, coming leftward at Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito in Moloch (1999), Taurus (2001) and The Sun (2005) respectively, and then rounding the project with a screwy, grotty retelling of Faust (2011). Fairytale picks up the thread, in a sense – a film that sees the lust for power as a lost game of ghosts.
It's not quite like any other film, for purely textural reasons: crafted largely without cameras, the film deploys digital imaging to revivify old newsreel footage of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Churchill, removing them from their historical contexts, and without ado plopping these four preening ogres down into a mist-shrouded purgatory, where they wander, grumble, bicker and bemoan their WWII decisions. You think you're looking at a whole film built with AI deepfakes – such a thing awaits us soon enough – but Sokurov only needed to digitally restore the footage, get a team of crack compositors to seamlessly layer the imagery, and dub the old power-dealers with new voices and dialogue, in their own tongues.
Suggested Reading The film that put Netanyahu in court
Ian Winwood
Undead echoes of political hubris, the four miserable spirits (plus a few moments with Napoleon, whose ghost is already fading away into forgetfulness) proliferate – an average scene could have three Stalins and three Mussolinis and so forth, all at different ages and in different uniforms, gabbing with each other. They saunter past the camera and each other, idly exploring their vast holding cell, an un-Christianised limbo mostly comprised of antique etchings of ancient ruins, caves, and tangled forests, all of it drenched with Sokurov's trademarked murky haze. (The dust motes, the single added tear on Stalin's cheek…)
Skazka (2022) Skazka (2022)
Very real dead soldiers litter the landscape, and you can see bombed-out cities in the distance. The dead men seem to want to talk to God, to negotiate their way out. But mostly they dismissively bounce off one another, like ghosts in a Beckett play, walking in large circles, tossing growled insults, and remarking a lot on how the others stink.
All movies are dreams, but watching Sokurov's films can be like slowly waking from a dawn sleepwalk, moist with sweat and one step away from a cliff-edge. The primary experience of Fairytale does not coddle you with narrative progression – which shouldn't come as a stunner for Sokurov fans, who might have with Stone (1992), Spiritual Voices (1995) and Russian Ark under their belts. It is, rather, an exercise in poisonous iconicity, mustering out of thin air a kind of metaphysical autopsy on 20th-century Euro-fallout, in the shape of a dream in which you want to run but can't move your feet.
The less hardy viewers may squirm, but for anyone willing to consider films as objets d'art rather than merely snappy stories – they're Sokurov's tribe – every moment of Fairytale is a conjured miracle, graphically gorgeous and mysterious while simultaneously reconstituting these legendary men for real (not actors masquerading), and having us reconsider their vainglorious absurdity in sharp contrast to the historical destruction they wrought so long ago. That's the magic of found footage at work: we step into the ruminative abyss between the original intentions of the piece of film (here, newsreels and propaganda) and the ironic, recontextualised purposes it is put to now. Each image means, but Sokurov has reclaimed them and resituated them, and set these charismatic megafauna scrambling like self-deluded rats in a maze without an exit.
In fact, the film is almost a valedictorian gesture for Sokurov, whose early short Sonata for Hitler (1979/89) was a howl of rage assembled entirely from archive footage. It's a sign of the man's aesthetic energy that as he has careened through various forms and genres – found footage experiments (ranging from ten minutes to 13 hours long) but also ironic adaptations of Flaubert and Shaw, free-associative documentaries, surreally visualised melodrama, brooding realism, twisted historical biopics, historical journalism, ambient dream videos, and so on – there's no mistaking his stubborn spectral signature.
Sokurov's scrupulous anti-narrative manner and demiurgic authority with visual mood shapes every sort of material into a unique mirage, crepuscular, elusive, cunningly accented by layered dissolves or reflected distortions. There's almost too much of it.
Any cinema or museum organising a complete Sokurov retrospective would have its work cut out for it; imdb.com has never been able to quite keep up, and Sokurov's own website declares itself as 'an attempt' to corral his output. If Fairytale does turn out to be his epic career's capstone, it would be both a fascinating farewell and a life's work well completed. But it would also be tragic for us..
Fairytale is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

BBC News

12 hours ago

• BBC News

The Documentary Podcast Joachim Trier: The making of Sentimental Value

We go behind the scenes with director Joachim Trier as he makes the follow-up to his international hit The Worst Person In The World. Producer Stephen Hughes gets exclusive access to the set of Sentimental Value, following the film from pre to post production. In a series of candid interviews, the writer-director reveals the anxiety he feels every time he has to make a movie, and how he is helped by his loyal team: screenwriter Eskil Vogt and producers Andrea Berentsen Ottmar, Maria Ekerhovd and Lars Thomas Skare. And it is a story with a happy ending, as Sentimental Value wins the prestigious Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Daily Mirror

a day ago

• Daily Mirror

'How I brought down one of the UK's most powerful crime lords'

Former Daily Mirror Crime Correspondent Sylvia Jones tells the gripping story of how she went undercover to snare 'untouchable' gangster John 'Goldfinger' Palmer John 'Goldfinger' Palmer was in the elegant lounge of London's Ritz hotel when the beginning of the end arrived. He was sitting at a tea table with two Burmese opium producers in June 1994, celebrating finalising a £65million-a-year money laundering deal, when a large figure loomed over him and announced: 'Roger Cook, Central Television. We've come to talk to you.' ‌ It was a voice familiar to the 10 million viewers who regularly tuned in to watch television's biggest investigator uncover, confront and pursue criminals and wrongdoers. ‌ And it marked the start of Palmer's descent from a man with a royal-level fortune and a life of yachts, fast cars, Rolexes and helicopters to prison – and, ultimately, his death in a suburban back garden. Palmer, a former gold dealer, had risen to fame and fortune smelting gold bars stolen in the Brink's-Mat bullion robbery 11 years earlier. On trial at the Old Bailey in 1987, charged with conspiracy to handle the stolen gold, he admitted melting down large amounts at his mansion in Bath, but claimed not to know it was stolen. When the jury acquitted him he blew them a kiss. He went on to set up a huge timeshare fraud operation, cajoling or intimidating thousands of folk out of their hard-earned savings and ruling the holiday island of Tenerife with his posse of violent, steroid-fuelled musclemen. ‌ This ruthless 'business model' was essential for Palmer's real activities of laundering ever-increasing amounts of dirty money for his underworld criminal cronies, thieving Russian oligarchs, and other corrupt government officials and politicians who plundered their own countries. The latest series of the BBC drama The Gold fictionalises this period in Palmer's life. Played by Tom Cullen, he boasts to one of his heavies as he steps off a private jet: 'A ghost, that's what I am in England – no passport control, no nosy b****** spotting me in an airport and calling the press or the Old Bill. ‌ 'Because I beat them, you see. The English police – I beat the best they have.' This is where I came in. After becoming the first female crime reporter on Fleet Street when working for the Mirror, I moved to the Cook Report in the early 1990s. During painstaking research for a programme on Palmer, I assembled a mountain of evidence about his hugely lucrative money laundering activities and estimated he had more than £400m sloshing around in different banks in secretive financial centres, including Russia. ‌ The vast Communist state was crumbling as greedy government agents, businessmen and the Russian mafia began to plunder the country's most valuable assets. I traced at least 100 companies, dozens of offshore accounts and business interests in the UK, Europe and around the world, and as far away as South America, South Africa and the Caribbean. Palmer used these companies to move around millions of pounds from timeshare, property, leisure and finance organisations. He mixed this money up with large deposits of ill-gotten cash that swirled around and came out of the Palmer 'washing machine' looking untainted and ready to hand back to his criminal associates – minus his 25% commission, of course. ‌ I informed Scotland Yard about our impending Palmer sting – we called the show 'Laundry Man'. Brink's-Mat detectives whose bid to convict him had failed in 1987 literally fell off their chairs laughing. 'He will never fall for it,' they claimed. Gathering legally watertight evidence needed a very special plan, a sophisticated sting so close to the real thing that not even the streetwise Palmer would suspect he was being lured into a TV trap. ‌ I recruited Buddy Burns, a retired US undercover drug enforcement detective, to talk his way into Palmer's tight-knit organisation. A tough, grizzled Native American who had worked more drug stings than I'd had hot dinners, Buddy was a perfect choice. He posed as the 'representative' of notorious Burmese warlord Khun Sa, then the world's biggest opium producer and top of theFBI's most-wanted list. ‌ He was, Buddy explained in an initial phone call to Palmer's Spanish solicitor, looking for a discreet 'businessman' willing and big enough to handle £30m twice a year from poppy crops. The prospect of the biggest deal of his life was an offer Goldfinger couldn't resist. He took the bait within days. The next vital phase of our elaborate sting involved Khun Sa himself. ‌ Actors, however good, would never be able to convince the wily Palmer. So I sent ex-soldier Patrick King into the jungle of war-torn Burma to enlist the help of Khun Sa – who Roger had interviewed two years earlier. America's most wanted man agreed to help us and dispatched two of his closest aides. I posed as a shady local fixer hired by Buddy to look after the Burmese men. At a smart mews house in Marylebone, Central London, we secretly recorded meetings between Palmer and Khun Sa's henchmen. I handed out drinks and takeaway Thai food to Palmer as he sat cross-legged on the floor with the Burmese men. My real job, however, was to make sure no one stood in front of the secret cameras and to troubleshoot and rescue the situation if anything went wrong. Palmer's bodyguards were never far away so we had to be ready for anything at a moment's notice. ‌ By this time Palmer was so convinced he was finalising the biggest dirty deal of his career that he explained exactly how his money laundering operation worked, which we caught on camera. He was so comfortable that he even revealed he had several 'wives' and girlfriends. 'Just a secret between us,' he added – little realising his real wife, Marnie, and 10 million viewers would soon be let in on his 'secret'. ‌ Once we had a wealth of self-confessed evidence from Palmer, we brought in Roger for the final denouement. It was hot and stuffy that summer's day as I sat in a black cab with the two Burmese men and knee-to-knee opposite Palmer, heading for the Ritz. I had a tape recorder tucked into my stocking top and secured to my suspender belt – the only place our blushing sound man could think of hiding it where it would not show through my light summer clothes. Then, once we were seated at the Ritz at a table laden with gleaming silverware, dainty crustless sandwiches and fresh cream fancies, Roger appeared, followed by a cameraman and several of our colleagues. ‌ Our timing was perfect. Shocked, but trying to hold himself together, the previously untouchable underworld Mr Big staggered to his feet as Roger told him we had filmed every contact he had had with Khun Sa's men. Palmer denied everything as he quickly walked to the hotel exit swiftly followed by Roger and the film crew. But he was no longer the smiling, confident wheeler dealer who had entered the Ritz a few minutes earlier. ‌ He looked pale and anxious as he jumped into a taxi. The cab got stuck at a red light and Roger opened the door and continued his devastating onslaught, egged on by workmen on scaffolding in a side street who had recognised him shouting: 'Go on, Roger! Give it to him, Roger!' When the taxi finally pulled away, Palmer sat stony faced inside, the perfect image of a man who has realised he had just been totally suckered. By this time, detectives were raiding all of his premises and addresses in the UK. Every time Palmer rang his offices, the phone was answered by the police. ‌ The taxi driver later told us he had thrown his phone out of the window in anger. Scotland Yard was staggered by the speed and success of our sting. They used our information as the basis for search warrants and gathered a mountain of documentary evidence that eventually led Palmer to another trial, again at the Old Bailey. ‌ In 2001 I gave evidence against him. He was defending himself and wore a bulletproof vest as he cross-examined me. Palmer tried to convince the jury the sting was a police suggestion to set him up because they could not get to him. But he failed, and this time there were no kisses for the jury. He was found guilty of defrauding thousands of timeshare victims out of millions of pounds and sentenced to eight years. He served four before release. In his later years he lived a much quieter life with his partner Christina Ketley and their son in Brentwood, Essex, where he socialised with a close circle of old friends. ‌ Then, 10 years ago, he was gunned down in the garden as he burned old papers on a bonfire, blasted six times with a shotgun. He was 65. No one has been jailed over his death. At the end of the 1990s, Palmer had been worth over £300m, and the Sunday Times Rich List rated him on a level with the Queen. By 2005, after four years behind bars, he was declared bankrupt, with debts of £3.5m. Goldfinger, it seemed, had finally lost his Midas touch.

Telegraph

2 days ago

• Telegraph

Celebrity nudity has gone too far

Am I the only one bored of nipples? From red carpets to album covers, baring it all seems to be all the rage. Over the years hems have gotten shorter, fabrics sheerer and underwear swapped for stick-on patches. At this point, what would really shock on a red carpet is long sleeves and a covered ankle. Sex sells – a story as old as time. So perhaps it's unsurprising how much nudity and sexuality is on display from movie stars and pop singers. But the response to what kind of nakedness is appropriate is interesting. Just a matter of years ago, female sexual nudity was not just condemned by priests and prudes but by feminist preachers, too. Magazines may have stopped publishing Page 3 girls, but now they're covered in semi-nude celebrities, while social media is awash with them. Last week, Sabrina Carpenter covered Rolling Stone naked, long hair covering her modesty, in tandem with a controversial cover for her forthcoming album Man's Best Friend which appears to show her on all fours at a man's feet, like a dog, with his hand pulling her hair. Meanwhile Liz Hurley celebrated her 60th birthday by posting pictures 'in her birthday suit' – as Gwyneth Paltrow did when turning 50. Kanye West's wife, Australian fashion designer Bianca Censori, attended the 2025 Grammys wearing a completely see-through mini dress without any underwear at all. This year the Cannes Film Festival went as far as to ban the 'naked dress' from the red carpet for 'decency reasons', in reaction to the number of celebrities attending the festival in little more than a g-string and some taffeta, with their breasts fully exposed. Women such as Rose MacGowan have called this kind of dressing an act of 'empowerment', while Carpenter supporters have praised her for 'subverting the male gaze' by reflecting it so brazenly. But are these powerful feminist statements or have we lost all sense of public decency? What's more, when it comes to celebrity nudity, the double standards are glaring. Who doesn't remember the picture of Kim Kardashian's bottom balancing a glass of champagne for a Paper Magazine cover that reportedly 'broke the internet'? What was so shocking about that episode wasn't that we were gazing at yet another picture of one of the Kardashians' backsides, but the fact that Labour MP and queen of the feminist morality police, Harriet Harman, praised it on breakfast television. In an interview with Good Morning Britain, Harman said the Kardashian women possess 'a kind of bravery and a pioneering… spirit to them'. But what about all those years of arguing that sexualised women should be banned from the shelves of corner shops and that the pornification of women was a disgrace worthy of legal action? In her argument, Harman seemed to suggest that Page 3 girls, in their working-class ignorance, had no idea what they were doing or why they were doing it. But the Kardashians, one of the world's richest celebrity families, 'are in control of their own agenda'. The middle-class war on working-class women's bodies was yet again evidenced in 2018, when 'walk-on girls' Charlotte Wood and Daniella Allfree were axed by darts bosses after pressure to end the 'sexist' practice of glamorous women at events. In a now infamous episode of This Morning, feminist writer Sally Howard told Allfree and Wood that they were 'demeaning' to women, and should be prevented from glamour modelling for the feminist cause. Perhaps the flak she got for her condescending nonsense hurt enough to make her think twice, but a cursory google shows that Howard has yet to comment on any of the other public appearances of sexualised women. The message is clear: some boobs are 'demeaning', and some are 'empowering'. These days, the darts girls look demure in comparison to what goes on. Tight dresses and high heels were about as racy as they got – in comparison to female celebrities today who seem to be allergic to bras and knickers. The fashion world might have been unsettled when organisers at the Cannes film festival banned the 'naked' dress, but perhaps punters were simply sick of seeing Bella Hadid's nipples? A celebration of female sexuality is one thing – Marilyn Monroe was a beautiful woman who knew how to dress to impress. But there is something a little bleak about seeing image after image of half-starved models with their nether regions on show. Despite it all screaming sex, none of it seems very sexy. Perhaps the best example of this de-sexing of nudity is Censori. Her nude stunts – seemingly controlled by an increasingly unhinged West – aren't shocking because she is in her birthday suit, but because she looks so pained while doing it. There is no fun or celebration to this sexualisation. In fact, some have raised suspicions about how consensual it all is. But while Censori might be the extreme end of the nudity wars, she represents the hollowing out of sex in the public eye. All these barely-there women seem bored with their own nudity. The problem with this 'nudity as empowerment' narrative is that it gets murky very quickly. The other week, Sydney Sweeney went viral for her Dr Squatch soap, which, the male grooming brand claimed, contained droplets of Sweeney's actual used bathwater. The savvy campaign capitalised, with winking irony, their Sweeney ad from the previous year, which saw the star lying in a foaming bath tub, telling 'dirty little boys' to clean up. The comments section was full of, among other things, men requesting Sweeney's bathwater, while many women criticised her for encouraging male objectification. The week the new ad dropped, Sweeney spoke to the Sunday Times about sometimes struggling to be taken seriously in the boardroom and behind-the-scenes of her production company – particularly by other women. 'A woman's body is beyond empowering and beautiful and sexy and all the things,' she said. 'And I think that one day I will be able to have control of the narrative of my body. I'll take the power.' Is it really so anti-feminist to suggest she would have more luck being taken seriously in the boardroom if she didn't sell her used bathwater to horny young men? I've never been a fan of telling women to cover up. While I might dislike most of her politics, I rallied to Angela Rayner's defence when the Right went into meltdown over her legs being on show during Prime Minister's Questions. Telling women what to wear is never a good idea – from conservatives with their knickers in a twist to finger-wagging feminists. But we should ask ourselves, are we having a good time with all this nudity? Sabrina Carpenter's album cover might be a two-fingered salute to decorum, but is it radical if we had already lost it years ago? If there are no more nipples left to free, perhaps it might be more shocking to start tucking them away.