Andrei Tarkovsky’s visionary final film unfolds in the hours before a nuclear holocaust. Erland Josephson, in an award-winning role, plays retired actor Alexander who is celebrating his birthday with family and friends when a crackly TV announcement warns of an imminent nuclear catastrophe.

Alexander makes a promise to God that he will sacrifice all he holds dear, if the disaster can be averted. The next day dawns and, as if in a dream, everything is restored to normality. But Alexander must keep his vow.

Among many other awards, The Sacrifice won the Cannes Grand Prix in 1986, the same year that Tarkovsky died of cancer in Paris at the age of 54.

A psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a distant planet in order to discover what has caused the crew to go insane.

In an unnamed country at an unspecified time, there is a fiercely protected post-apocalyptic wasteland known as The Zone. An illegal guide (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky), whose mutant child suggests unspeakable horrors within The Zone, leads a writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn) and a scientist (Nikolay Grinko) into the heart of the devastation in search of a mythical place known only as The Room. Anyone who enters The Room will supposedly have any of his earthly desires immediately fulfilled.