Fairytale

Legendary director Alexander Sokurov reanimates Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, as well as Jesus and Napoleon, with the use of 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.