This film screened 15th May 2016.

Andrei Rublev, what Tarkovsky called a “film of the earth”, is an epic, largely fictionalised biography of the great 15th-century Russian iconographer. Broken into eight chapters which recount incidents from the artist’s life, its backdrop of medieval Russia is a time of conflict and cruelty in which Andrei, a humanist who only wishes to inspire with his art, faces his own struggle between the physical and the spiritual. The film led to controversy and censorship in the USSR, an ironic fate for a film that examines Tarkovsky’s personal fascination with the connection between an artist and the time in which the artist lives.

This film is screening as part of our Andrei Tarkovsky season, May 14th – 28th.