FAUST World Cinema

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, FAUST is director Alexander Sokurov’s fourth and final film in his tetralogy on the corrupting effects of power In MOLOCH, TAURUS and THE SUN , Sokurov turned his gaze on Hitler, Lenin and Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, respectively. Here , the RUSSIAN ARK director offers a visceral, freestyle reading of the legend of Dr. Faust, a scholar who exchanges his soul for unlimited knowledge Departing sharply from Goethe’s version of the tale, Sokurov’s Faust Johannes Zeiler) inhabits an earthy, 19th-century world of primitive autopsies and medical rituals. He becomes obsessed wit h the beautiful Margarete (lsolda Dychauk) and desperately turns to a physically grotesque moneylender to conjure their union. Intensified by the immersive, painterly cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel (AM ELIE), FAUST is a poetic meditation on, and a sensually overwhelming vision of, man’s unyielding hunger for knowledge