Film Details

Fourteen years after Russian Ark, his single-shot exploration of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov turns his attention to Paris’ Louvre. Francofonia, which won the top prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is a visually stunning meditation on this great institution that Sokurov sees as the repository of European art and culture. Ghosts (like Napoleon) walk the halls, and ample screen time is devoted to dramatizing the unlikely WWII-era alliance between then Louvre director Jacques Jaujard and German officer and overseer Count Franz Wolff-Metternich, a Hitler appointee. (The two men collaborated to safeguard the art works during the war and to keep them in France.) “A freewheeling poetic essay, highly personal yet captivating.” –Variety. Cleveland premiere. Subtitles. DCP. 87 min.