Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Churchill meet in a purgatorial netherworld through deepfake animation in the Russian director's new film.

Fairytale, director Aleksandr Sokurov’s first film in seven years, arrived at its world premiere at last year’s Locarno Film Festival with little advance notice. A fanciful title and a cryptic artist’s statement was all most viewers had to go on when encountering what is, as I wrote in my festival report, arguably “the Russian master’s most left-field offering yet: a speculative fiction made with deepfake technology that imagines an encounter between Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill.”

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