Alexander Sokurov's Spiritual Voices was shot during an 18-month period in the mid 1990s. In this extraordinarily patient and compassionate work, Sokurov accompanies an army platoon patrolling the battle lines of Russia's war with Afghanistan. Scrutinizing the gestures, rituals, and emotions of the homesick young soldiers, he develops a deep understanding of squadron life, compiling a meditation on tedium, fear, and a cognitive static that scratches and randomly flares into occasional paroxysms of excessive alarm igniting every soldier's sensorium. The themes are philosophical, existential, and political, but the viewer comprehends them in a mode that is – remarkably – as emotional as it is intellectual, as felt as it is thought. Even so, the feelings that Sokurov captures and evokes are structured rather than scattershot. Spiritual Voices is exquisitely composed and analytical.

The five instalments of Spiritual Voices were originally shown in a serial programme spanning consecutive sessions, as a long, poetic video essay displayed in cinema festivals and on television. Then, during a brief period in the early 2000s, Sokurov endorsed some experimentation into how the work functions when it is encountered as a multiscreen installation that displays all five channels simultaneously and continuously. He granted once-only exhibition licences to two museums – the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne – permitting display of the work in the five-screen format so that the images were spanned in a concave configuration stretching to the edges of the spectator's peripheral vision.