This early work by one of the leading figures of contemporary Russian cinema (and protegé of director Andrei Tarkovsky) is a highly imaginative adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, a play that invokes the calamitous events of World War I as an oblique backdrop to its biting satire of the leisure class. Incorporating documentary footage from the Second World War and readings from Shaw's diaries and letters, Sokurov focuses on the senselessness of war and the consequences of an individualist ideology. These measures effectively distance the characters of Shaw's house from the monumental social changes occurring all around them. (Harvard Film Archive)