This lyrical study for the five-part, seven-hour Spiritual Voices, in which it is included as a scene, explores footage of soldiers on patrol duty on the border between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan—a parable of young men positioned between peace and war.

The title of this portrait of perfunctory participants at an official May Day parade and fireworks display in Leningrad refers to an Orthodox prayer of repentance: “Let my prayer be like incense before Thee, like my hands uplifted, an evening sacrifice.” Questioning the longstanding role of the crowd in Soviet cinema, Sokurov portrays the undulating sea of people not as part of some joyous unanimity but as a gathering of tired participants acting without leadership or purpose.

This latest work from Sokurov evokes the timelessness of a dream-state as it presents the voyage of an unnamed man (Sokurov’s own silhouette) across snow-covered landscapes through a journey that culminates in a deserted museum at night. In the nocturnal silence, surrounded by Dutch masterworks, the man discovers that he himself may have been present when the portrait of St. Mary’s Square was painted by Peter Saenredam in the seventeenth century.