In this dream odyssey, a disembodied narrator drifts through a remote, mist–shrouded Japanese island, encountering other souls suspended somewhere between life and death. "Do you know how men alter after death?" the narrator asks, and learns that they become kinder, more tender. "Sokurov brings his characteristic lyricism and visual beauty to Oriental Elegy. The black–and–white images are ghostly as the fog slowly disperses over the island to reveal spare, elegant compositions: stark pine trees or a solitary house set high in the hills" (Janet Maslin, New York Times). Sokurov said, "When the picture of a small Japanese town on a misty island was being created as if by magic by a human hand, I didn't bother asking myself what town it was, nor in what country it was. I tried to reconstruct the feeling of sorrow on the screen. Oriental Elegy is an attempt to find the very source of the image itself, an attempt to search beyond painting, beyond literature."