Unfolding over two days in 1924, the film depicts the dying Lenin, world revolutionary and father of the USSR, now powerless and isolated at his Gorki estate. Cared for by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, sister Maniasha, his German doctor and several attendants, Lenin raves about his diminishing faculties, discusses the deaths of great figures (including Marx), rides a car to a picnic in a meadow and ponders his historic legacy.
Direction
Sokurov's suffocating long takes trap you in Lenin's decaying mind.
Acting
Mozgovoy's Lenin: grotesque, pathetic, yet weirdly magnetic.
Cinematography
Digital video that looks like dying celluloid—perfect accident.
Director
Aleksandr Sokurov
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of Sokurov's 'Men of Power' tetralogy with Moloch (Hitler) and The Sun (Hirohito)—he called tyrants his 'monsters'.
Banned from Russian TV for 'denigrating the founder'—Sokurov had to premiere it in Cannes. The regime hated seeing Lenin as meat.
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