Tarkovsky was a Russian filmmaker, writer, and film theorist. He is widely considered one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, and one of Russia’s most influential filmmakers.

There’s nothing more earthy, more carnal than the work of this reputed mystical filmmaker — maybe because Russian mysticism is not that of Catholics terrified by nature and body …

In over two and a half decades, Tarkovsky made only seven feature films — a canon half the size of the sparse oeuvre of Robert Bresson, a director with whom the Russian shared many affinities. Both explored themes of spiritual anguish, the search for grace and oblivion, and the conflict between the spiritual and the material, between faith and the barbarity of the world; both made the mystical or ineffable inhere in the materiality of objects, colours, textures.