About

Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s dramatic epic follows the life of renowned 15th century religious icon painter Andrei Rublev (played by long-time Tarkovsky collaborator Anatoly Solonitsyn), and his struggles to reconcile his spiritual faith and artistic practice in the face of religious dogma and repression. Told through a series of poetically linked historical vignettes, the film breathtakingly captures the emotional landscape of a country and the forces struggling to define its nationhood.

The film opens with a stunning sequence – that not only echoes later events but, in many ways, acts as a parable for Rublev’s life – in which a man takes to the skies in a crude hot-air balloon of his own devising. Derided by spectators, he finds ecstasy in his inspired invention, only for the cruel limitations of reality to bring him back to earth.

As much a cinematic panorama of medieval Russia as the story of an artist’s life, Tarkovsky’s wonderfully ornate yet tactile film is an exploration of religious and artistic freedom and the anguished labour of finding one’s personal creative voice. Originally suppressed and heavily censored by Soviet authorities, Tarkovsky’s second feature is widely-considered a masterpiece of twentieth-century cinema.

Andrei Rublev will screen from an archival 35mm print.