Sokurov's recent work was the critical hit of the Venice Film Festival; many claimed it was superior to anything in competition. In images composed to evoke a kind of timelessness and dream-state, the voyage of an unnamed man (really Sokurov's own silhouette) takes us across snow-covered landscapes, from the baptism of a baby through a "homeland abandoned" and into a deserted museum at night where a Tarkovskian boy speaks an unknown language. In the nocturnal silence, surrounded by Dutch masterworks, the man discovers that he himself may have been present when Peter Saenredam painted Saint Mary's Square in the seventeenth century. "A tour de force of movement, right down to the micro-undulations that give the screen the aspect of tremulous living tissue" (Lauren Sedofsky, Artforum).