Ivan's Childhood

Synopsis

Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature Ivan’s Childhood is an extraordinarily moving view of war and revenge. 12-year old Ivan is determined to avenge his family’s death at the hands of the Nazis, and he joins a Russian partisan regiment as a scout. The wonderful monochrome photography depicts Ivan’s war in a series of memorable sequences: from the opening shots of him creeping through a dead and submerged forest; the flashback to happier days by the seashore; his devastated home village, to the final sequences in the paper-strewn ruins of Berlin in 1945. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of WWII and the serene moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky’s film remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of violence on children in wartime.

"Andrei Tarkovsky’s objective in Ivan’s Childhood was, in his own words, “to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director.” He succeeded brilliantly: this austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema." – Dina Iordanova, Ivan’s Childhood: Dreams Come True