This film was released 20th May 2016, and is no longer screening.

EXCLUSIVELY AT IFI

An iconic, influential film of force and poetic beauty in which Tarkovsky favours “associative linking” over “linear sequentiality”, Mirror is a semi- autobiographical work that collapses the prevailing distinction between individual and collective history, memory and experience.

Fluctuating between different time periods – the mid-1930s, the war-time period and the narrative present set in the early 1970s – Tarkovsky ingeniously merges dream, vision, real time and archive sequences to evoke a portrait in radical form of his own psychology and of those connected to him including his son, a neighbouring Spanish family, an orphan at a military school, but perhaps most evocatively, his ex-wife and mother, both played at various stages with inimitable depth by Margarita Terekhova. It is difficult to recall when cinema has been more expressive or worked more effectively to contest the monumental history of a state than in this vital, mysterious film. (Notes by Alice Butler.)

Mirror is re-released as part of Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time (May 14th-28th).

Don’t forget we now schedule weekly.