“Well, at first we decided, then we changed our minds.” Alexander Sokurov was not awarded the special prize of the Moscow Film Festival, promised by Nikita Mikhalkov

At the closing ceremony of the 48th Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF), they did not award the special prize “For Contribution to World Cinema,” which director Alexander Sokurov was expected to receive. Kommersant reported this.

Earlier on April 14, director Lyubov Arkus said that Sokurov received a letter from MIFF President Nikita Mikhalkov. In her Telegram channel, she published a photo of a letter signed by Mikhalkov. It said that Sokurov was invited to the closing ceremony of the festival, where he would be awarded the prize “For Contribution to World Cinema.”

According to Kommersant, neither Sokurov nor Mikhalkov took part in the closing ceremony of the MIFF. The festival president was also not present at the opening ceremony on April 16. At the same time, at the Moscow International Film Festival there was a special screening of Sokurov’s five-hour documentary film “The Director’s Notebook,” dedicated to the history of Russia from 1961 to 1995. The premiere of the film took place last year at the festival in Venice; it had not previously been shown in Russia. In Moscow, Sokurov personally presented the film.

In a conversation with the publication Podem, Sokurov said that the presentation of the award to him “was cancelled,” but no one gave a reason for this.

“Well, what can I say? Well, at first we decided, then we changed our minds. This is so familiar to us, in fact. I'm just not very excited about this situation, to be honest. You never know what happens. Well, they decided this way, then they decided differently. Who am I to explain myself to me? Yes, this is all nonsense. We don’t work for awards, we make films because we have to make films, and the fact that this happens is, well, impolite, well, rude, boorish, but God bless him. Let these be their internal problems,” the director said.

He also noted that Mikhalkov did not contact him after the invitation to the closing ceremony of the MIFF.

Update. In his Telegram channel, Sokurov later said that at the Moscow International Film Festival, during the presentation of his film “The Director’s Notebook,” he gave the festival’s program director a letter addressed to Mikhalkov, “with a proposal to pay attention to the situation in Russian cinema.” “On the eve of the premiere of our film, I received confirmation of my assumptions - the award ceremony was cancelled. Well, if it’s cancelled, then it’s cancelled. My job is to work on films,” the director said.

• Lyubov Arkus also claimed in her post that film centers in St. Petersburg, including Aurora and Rodina, refused to show a large retrospective of Sokurov’s films for his anniversary. According to her, the director is “on some kind of black list.”
• In October 2023, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation refused to issue a distribution certificate for the film “The Fairy Tale” by Alexander Sokurov. The film tells how Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill meet in hell.
• Alexander Sokurov is a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights. In December 2025, the director spoke at a meeting of the Council, in which Vladimir Putin participated. He said that there are fewer budget-funded places in Russian universities due to the fact that they are occupied by children of participants in the war with Ukraine, called it humiliation that people are declared “foreign agents,” and also spoke about censorship in cinema and literature.