Viktor Kossakovsky

Pigs, cows and chickens. Intimate portraits of living beings who wind up dead on a plate every day.

A 3-year-old girl and her family's long journey from a Greek refugee centre to Uppsala.

Seven-year-old Polina and her 13-year-old sister Nastia live and breathe ballet. Both of them are studying at the Boris Eifman Dance Academy in frigid Saint Petersburg. They’re currently awaiting their grades to find out if they’ve done well enough to be promoted to the next year, with Nastia lovingly guiding he little sister through the process. But in the meantime, Nastia also has to deal with the high demands that the academy places on its students. The gorgeously styled shots are sometimes calm, even clinical, and sometimes warm, lively and funny.

Football seen through the eyes of some of the best directors of the world.

In his film, the Chilean film director accompanies Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky during the shooting of his latest film. In Patagonia, at Lake Baikal and in Shanghai, Victor Kossakovsky explores the singular relationships between places and people on opposite sides of the world. Carlos Klein documents the making of this ambitious film in a very personal way, driven by his own inner search for images that still have an impact on us. While doing so, he reveals his own and Kossakovsky‘s ambiguous attitude towards filmmaking.

In Russian, "Svyato" means "happy". But it is also a nickname for Svyatoslav, the son of director Kossakovsky, who for two years covered mirrors from Svyato. For the first time in his life, Svyato is going to watch himself on a mirror.

The director films the street where he lives in St. Petersburg, for a whole year, documenting the changes caused by the celebration of its 300th anniversary.

The toddlers in a Russian playgroup are showing a striking number of adult traits. Here and there, serious romantic relationships are budding, and some tots are determined to marry. One infant may urge her friend to keep his voice low, or else the filmmakers will hear everything they say, but most pre-schoolers are undisturbed and continue their everyday activities. They play with dolls, hang around on the playground and chatter a lot, particularly about who is whose friend and who is whose lover. In this environment, the direct cinema style seems even more natural than it usually is. Two years ago, IDFA screened Victor Kossakovsky’s film Pavel and Lyalya (a Jerusalem Romance), which dealt with the profound and unselfish love of an elderly couple. In contrast, the infatuations of young kids are volatile and playful, because ten minutes later you can be married to someone else.

Trilogy about love, experienced at different moments in life, by different people: an old couple, a young couple and two children at infant school.

“Like the right and left hand Your soul is close to my soul We are sealed shut, blissfully and warmly, Like the right and left wing…” The life and art of Pavel Kogan and Lyudmila Stanukinas, two famous Leningrad documentary filmmakers, can best be expressed by the Tsvetaeva stanza cited above. They are the main characters of this film, which their student Viktor Kossakovsky shot during Pavel Kogan’s final months. For Lyudmila Stanukinas, Lyalya, as those close to her called her, her husband was her only reason for existence. She was with him until the end and held onto his extinguishing life as much as she could.

A documentary about everyday life in Russia.

"Belovy (the Belovs)" is a breathtaking portrait of a troubled peasant family. It's poetry in the form of a documentary that won many prizes. Beautifully shot in vintage black and white, the film tells the story of two times widow Anna Belova who lives together with her brother Mikhail. Blending the two personalities, Kosakovsky characterizes the true Russian soul: she is the rational worker, honest and strong - he is the drunken poet, the idealist, his philosophy fades into radical nonsense time after time.

It was one of his mentors who once told Kossakovsky, "There are two types of intelligent people; some say what they know, while others think while they speak, in order to try and say something they did not know yet, something that suggests itself in them." Victor Kossakovsky took this profundity to heart and became a filmmaker of the second category. He dedicated his documentary debut to the speaker of these words, the Russian philosopher and religious thinker Alexey Fedorovich Losev (1893-1988), who died shortly after the completion of this film. Shot in black-and-white, the film consists of two crucial shots that symbolize silence and night at both ends of the life chain. In the beginning of the film, the rising sun slowly swathes a cemetery in daylight. At the end, the earth covers a coffin bit by bit and heralds the great darkness. In Losev's words, "Divine intentions that lie beyond our reason, that's why we die."

Remarkable footage of a Barcelona anti-austerity demonstration – and its quelling – shaped into a lyrical tribute to the spirit of protest by Victor Kossakovsky ( ¡Vivan las Antipodas!) and 32 Spanish film students.

Director Victor Kossakovsky dedicated his documentary debut to the Russian philosopher and religious thinker Alexey Fedorovich Losev (1893-1988), who died shortly after the completion of the film.