In Search of Alexandra

When the filmcrew came to her flat, nobody answered. The door was locked on the inside. It turned out that Alexandra Korsakova, the famous Russian painter and widow of Talin, had commited suicide.
The film shows the gruesome death and funeral of this last representative of Russian Avant-garde, whose achievements had wilfully been ignored in Soviet Russia but highly appreciated in Western Europe. By means of interviews with friends and fellow artists, art critics and officials, an attempt is made to reconstruct the life and death of this on orthodox and outstanding person. Conversations with the investigator in charge with the research in cause of her death, give the film an intruiging dimension. Initially, he did not exclude death by violence. Even when this idea was abandoned later on, the question remains: Why did Alexandra Korsakova commit suicide while expecting a Dutch film-crew and shortly before the opening of her exhibition in Arnhem, Holland? Was it an artist's crisis or fear of her approaching natural death? And why did she bequeath all her property, including her life's artistic work, to the female sculptor Lyudmila Kremanova instead of her relatives? Lyudmila intends to grant a significant part of the inheritance to museums in the United States and Holland, which brings her in sharp conflict with the Union of Soviet artists and representatives of Russian Museums. Alexandra's paintings reveal her emotinal experience, her fantasies, her searching, perhaps the hidden secrets of her life and death. Where will this heritage finally find its place?
While presenting more questions than answers, the film shows Alexandra's environment, the people she lived with and the things that were of interest to her, leading the observer to meditations about temporary and eternal values and eventually about vanity.