This is a devastating, almost cruel portrait of Boris Yeltsin, in which the leader is removed from the public arena of speeches and propaganda and placed in the quintessential Sokurovian space: one of silence, stillness, inaction. The result is an ambiguous vision of immobility verging on paralysis and death.

Just weeks before he became Russia’s first democratically elected president, Sokurov engaged a deeply fatigued, mumbling Boris Yeltsin in a provocative discussion of his personal beliefs. Set in and around Yeltsin’s family home in an informal atmosphere of tea and blinis, the film asks the urgent question: “Who is this man?” Sokurov inflects his portrait with a sound track that obscures Yeltsin’s voice often to the point of incomprehensibility.