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.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s extraordinarily accomplished debut feature ‘Ivan’s Childhood’ is a powerful and moving tale of a 12-year-old boy who vows to avenge his family’s death at the hands of the Nazis.
Striking up a friendship with three sympathetic Soviet officers, young Ivan becomes a spy on the eastern front.
The film was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival in 1962 and brought the Russian director international acclaim. A haunting and poetic depiction of a childhood ravaged by war.
★★★★★ “It is one of the great coups de cinéma. Unmissable” - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Tracing the life of a renowned icon painter, the second feature by Andrei Tarkovsky vividly conjures the murky world of medieval Russia. This dreamlike and remarkably tactile film follows Andrei Rublev as he passes through a series of poetically linked scenes—snow falls inside an unfinished church, naked pagans stream through a thicket during a torchlit ritual, a boy oversees the clearing away of muddy earth for the forging of a gigantic bell—gradually emerging as a man struggling mightily to preserve his creative and religious integrity. Appearing here in the director's preferred 183-minute cut as well as the version that was originally suppressed by Soviet authorities, the masterwork Andrei Rublev is one of Tarkovsky's most revered films, an arresting meditation on art, faith, and endurance.
A psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a distant planet in order to discover what has caused the crew to go insane.
Using a nonlinear structure interlaced with dreams and flashbacks, director Andrei Tarkovsky creates a stream-of-consciousness meditation on war, memory and time that draws heavily on events from his own life.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s unforgettably haunting film, his first to be made outside Russia, explores the melancholy of the expatriate through the film’s protagonist, Gorchakov, a Russian poet researching in Italy.
Arriving at a Tuscan village spa with Eugenia, his beautiful Italian interpreter, Gorchakov is visited by memories of Russia and of his wife and children, and he encounters the local mystic who sets him a challenging task.
‘Nostalgia’ is filled with a series of mysterious and extraordinary images, all of which coalesce into a miraculous whole in the film’s final shot. As in all Tarkovsky’s films, nature, the elements of fire and water, music, painting and poetry all play a major role.
★★★★ “Hauntingly beautiful” - David Parkinson, Empire
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.