Alexander Sokurov's THE SECOND CIRCLE chronicles the bureaucratic hell a young man is put through when he returns to chilly Siberia to bury his estranged father. The son remains with the corpse remains in the boxy, decrepit apartment as he goes through the formalities from positive identification, nickel-and-diming funeral arrangements (quite a funny sequence that breaks up the grim monotony) and ransacking the apartment for hidden cash, the embalming(!), to depositing the body in the coffin and squeezing it out through the narrow doorway. We learn nothing of how the son actually felt about his father because even he is given next to no time to reflect. His reactions to the funeral agent's treatment of his father's corpse and belonging could suggest either a hint of sentiment or a gut reaction to a lack of respect for the dead. Not inaccessible, but also not particularly rewarding.

Fairly straightforward documentary subject by Alexander Sokurov chronicles the lives of husband and wife team Mstislav Rostropovich (a cellist who studied under Shostakovich) and Galina Vishnevskaya (a singer who took the Bolshoi Theatre by storm despite her initial lack of musical education) on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The documentary focuses on their upbringings, their careers, world travel, and their defiance of the Soviet government in sheltering dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (for which he was exiled). Their apartments are decorated with fifty-years of artwork collected during world tours as well as many Russian treasures, and Rostropovich also purchased a facing flat that belonged to composer Modest Mussorgsky (which he has turned into a museum for the composer). While Rostropovich continues to perform (seen both in archival footage and in contemporary video performing (under Vienna Philharmonic conductor Seiji Ozawa) performing for European royalty, Vishnevskaya retired from singing in 1982 to found her own school of operatic singing. Although both husband and wife were born a few years after the establishment of the Soviet Union, they have developed and maintained a very Russian sense of personhood through their performance of Russian music (Rostropovich maintains that Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" is Russian music, not Italian despite subject and setting) and curatorship of Russian art in general. Rostropovich died after the film in 2007, and Vishnevskaya appeared in Sokurov's Cannes hit ALEXANDRA the same year.