Francofonia

Francofonia (2015) is an essay film to watch online on iFILM, directed by Alexander Sokurov — who already made his meditation on the Hermitage with Russian Ark. Here he turns to another question: what happened to the Louvre when German forces occupied Paris.

The story at the centre is a quiet, uncomfortable pact. Louvre director Jacques Jaujard and German art commissioner Count Franz Wolff-Metternich found a shared interest in keeping the collection intact — and acted on it, while the war ran its course around them. Sokurov doesn't turn this into a thriller or a clean moral fable. He layers archival footage, staged scenes, and his own narrated reflections into something that asks about art, power, and what survives when everything else collapses. The film screened in competition at Venice in 2015. Stream Francofonia online on iFILM.