In 1994, Alexander Sokurov accompanied Russian troops assigned to a frontier military post at the Tajikistan/Afghanistan border to film their experiences. While unnamed tribal forces occasionally engaged the troops in skirmishes, Sokurov’s haunting documentary chronicles the downtime between activity.
A surreal journey of a displaced spirit as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness.
This small film came out of the material edited for Sokurov's five-hour documentary Spiritual Voices.
A Humble Life is certainly true to its title, a documentary study of the day-to-day world of Umeno Mathuyoshi, an old woman who lives in an isolated mountain house in the Nara prefecture in Japan.
