Metrograph

Tarkovsky’s magisterial feature debut, dubbed an exemplar of “socialist surrealism” by admirer Jean-Paul Sartre, follows a 12-year-old Russian boy orphaned during the German invasion of the USSR who, spurred by a passionate desire to avenge the death of his parents, embarks on a series of perilous missions taking him behind enemy lines. The hallucinatory quality of life in wartime has rarely been so vividly captured as it is by Tarkovsky in this transcendent work, a film of tour de force technical brio that moves freely between lyrical passages depicting its child soldier protagonist’s forever-lost family life and a present tense of unimaginable horror.

Distributor: Janus Films

35mm print courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research