Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Year: 1983
Country: Italy | Soviet Union
Language: Italian | Russian
Subtitles: English
Length: 125 mins
Format: PAL | R2
Colour: Colour | Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.66: 1
Certificate: 15
Alternate Title: Nostalghia

Synopsis

Andrei Tarkovsky recasts his lifelong cinematic motif of humanity's quest for faith in the waterlogged and mist-ensconced countryside of Italy. Andrei Gorchakov is a misanthropic Russian scholar researching the life of an exiled Russian composer who committed suicide. With the help of his beautiful guide, Eugenia, Andrei visits mystical and religious sites on the trail of the late composer's legacy. In the shadow of the composer's memory, Andrei finds himself crippled by a melancholy nostalgia for his Russian homeland, only to discover redemption in the form of a madman, Domenico. As in Mirror, Tarkovsky weaves a dense, meditative pattern of images-freely mixing past and present, dream and reality, color and black & white, landscape and architecture-with the scholar and the madman acting as allegorical players in a metaphysical trial by fire and water.