In a string of visionary films that challenged the audience’s perceptions of time and space, Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky created a cinematic language all his own, one in which weighty philosophical themes found expression in images of haunting, spectral beauty. Ranging from the transcendent medieval drama ANDREI RUBLEV to meditative sci-fi epics like SOLARIS and STALKER, his enormously influential masterpieces are consistent in their astonishing ambition and profound insights into spirituality and metaphysical experience.
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1961 • Soviet Union
When Sasha, a seven-year-old violin protégé, meets Sergei, a steamroller working in his neighborhood, he starts to open up from his strictly imposed routine of practice. Made as a thesis film for the VGIK Soviet film school, this early work by A...
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1962 • Soviet Union
Starring Nikolai Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, E. Zharikov
The debut feature by the great Andrei Tarkovsky, IVAN’S CHILDHOOD is a poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged youth. Moving back and forth between the trauma...
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1966 • Soviet Union
Starring Anatoly Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko
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 follow...
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1972 • Soviet Union
Starring Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Yuri Yarvet
Ground control has been receiving mysterious transmissions from the three remaining residents of the Solaris space station. When cosmonaut and psychologist Kris Kelvin is dispatched to i...
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1974 • Soviet Union
Starring Margarita Terekhova, Filipp Yankovskiy, Ignat Daniltsev
A subtly ravishing passage through the halls of time and memory, this sublime reflection on twentieth-century Russian history by Andrei Tarkovsky (STALKER) is as much a poem compos...
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1979 • Russian Federation
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart...
