Friday September 28th
Cinema 1
21.30
162 min
Russia, 1979
Russian, English subtitles
BFFE is proud to premier the new restoration by the EYE Filmmuseum of this classic masterpiece influenced by Buddhism. As early as 1972 Tarkovsky wrote in his diary:
‘I am very excited by Zen. I’m reading a dissertation about Koan. Very interesting’. Sound/music composer for Stalker, Edouard Artemiev recalls: ‘Andrei brought me the thesis and told me to read it, because it was important to him for me to understand the “East-West” idea’. (Interview on Stalker, disk 2).
In a not-too-distant future, a man known as ‘the Stalker’ leads expeditions into a mysterious, forbidden and dangerous area known as ’the Zone’. There hidden deep within the shifting and distorted landscape is a room in which one’s innermost desires will be granted. Deeply empathetic and full of haunting poetic images, Stalker is often regarded as prophetic of an ecological apocalypse. Tarkovsky: “Modern man is developing into a kind of earthworm: a tube that swallows up material and leaves little piles of waste behind him. Don’t be surprised if one day the earth disappears because man has swallowed it all. What good is it to go out into space if it’s only to distance ourselves from the fundamental problem of man: the harmonizing of the spiritual and the material world.”
Watch the trailer:
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky – Writers: Arkady & Boris Strugatskiy – Producer: Aleksandra Demidova – Cinematography: Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy, Georgi Rerberg, Leonid Kalashnikov – Editor: Lyudmila Feyginova – Sound: Vladimir Sharun
