Beginning our selection of Tarkovsky double bills, Second Run presents Ivan’s Childhood with the first masterpiece by acclaimed Hungarian Auteur Miklós Jancsó. Much like Tarkovsky’s own extraordinary World War II film, My Way Home delves into the devastating psychological effects of conflict on the young, to create a deeply moving and poetic view of life during wartime.

My Way Home
Miklós Jancsó
1964 | 98 min | B/W | Digital

In the final days of World War II, a young Hungarian is making his way home, through countryside full of the debris of war, when he is captured and imprisoned by Russians. Left in the custody of a young Russian soldier, the two youths form a friendship in spite of not speaking each other's language. The Hungarian's attempts to continue his journey homeward provide the framework for this powerful film, considered Miklós Jancsó's first masterpiece. Jancsó’s consistent vision – the psychological presence of landscape, the randomness of violence, the arbitrary nature of power – is first evident in this poetic, evocative and deeply personal work from one of cinema’s most acclaimed filmmakers.

Ivan’s Childhood
Andrei Tarkovsky
1962 | 96 min | B/W | DCP

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.