Product Review

Set against the backdrop of the Louvre Museum s history and artworks, master director Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) applies his uniquely personal vision onto staged re-enactments and archives for this fascinating portrait of real-life characters Jacques Jaujard and Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich and their compulsory collaboration at the Louvre Museum under the Nazi Occupation. These two remarkable men - enemies then collaborators - share an alliance which would become the driving force behind the preservation of museum treasures. In its exploration of the Louvre Museum as a living example of civilization, FRANCOFONIA is a stunning and urgently relevant meditation on the essential relationship between art, culture, and history. Throughout his vast filmography documentary, fiction and others somewhere in between Alexander Sokurov has demonstrated that a museum is much more than a place to preserve art. Museums are the veritable DNA of a civilization, the living organ of the city where the heart of a nation beats. With FRANCOFONIA, he explores a historical chapter that we might know, but whose description does not take into account all the lines that run through it. Sokurov s body of work includes his Men of Power tetralogy (Faust, The Sun [Emperor Hirohito], Taurus [Vladimir Lenin] and Moloch [Adolph Hitler]), Russian Ark (set entirely in St Petersburg s Hermitage Museum), Mother and Son and Father and Son.