Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky | Drama
Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia is perhaps the most intimate of all his films—not because it reveals more of its maker than Mirror, but because it quietly transforms his own exile into cinema. It is a work in which every image seems suspended between memory and disappearance, where landscapes carry emotional weight and silence becomes a language more eloquent than dialogue. If Andrei Rublev is his epic of artistic faith, Stalker his philosophical pilgrimage, and Mirror his fractured autobiography, Nostalghia is the meditation that follows, the film of a man who has realised that home is no longer a place to which he can return.
Made in Italy in 1983, the film follows Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov as he researches the life of an expatriate composer. Yet the narrative functions less as plot than as emotional terrain. Italy’s luminous churches, mist-covered pools and crumbling villas never become picturesque postcards; under Tarkovsky’s gaze they acquire the melancholy of remembered dreams. The country is beautiful, but beauty itself becomes another reminder of absence. Every frame aches with the distance between where the body resides and where the soul still wanders.
Tarkovsky’s cinema had always been preoccupied with time, memory and spiritual longing, but Nostalghia distils those themes into their purest form. Water drips through abandoned buildings, candles flicker against darkness, rain falls indoors as naturally as outdoors, and every elemental image suggests that the physical world is merely the visible skin of something eternal. His famously patient camera does not simply observe; it waits, inviting us into a different rhythm of existence where contemplation itself becomes dramatic.
The film’s emotional centre lies in the encounter between Gorchakov and the eccentric Domenico, a visionary dismissed as mad yet driven by a desperate belief that humanity has lost its spiritual compass. Their relationship avoids conventional symbolism. Instead, Tarkovsky presents two lonely men searching for redemption in different languages but with the same yearning. The extraordinary candle sequence—drawn out with unwavering conviction—becomes one of cinema’s most profound expressions of perseverance, demonstrating how an act of apparent futility can become an affirmation of faith.
What distinguishes Nostalghia within Tarkovsky’s canon is its sense of irreversible farewell. Although The Sacrifice, his final film, carries an even greater awareness of mortality, Nostalghia marks the moment when exile ceased to be temporary. During and after its production, Tarkovsky’s separation from the Soviet Union became permanent. He would never return to his homeland. The homesickness that gives the film its title is therefore not merely Gorchakov’s condition but the director’s own, expressed not as autobiography but as poetic truth.
Tarkovsky himself regarded Nostalghia with profound personal significance. He described nostalgia not as sentimental remembrance but as a painful spiritual condition—a longing that cannot be cured because what has been lost exists as much in time as in geography. The film emerged from his conviction that modern civilisation had become spiritually impoverished, increasingly detached from the inner life that art should nourish. In Nostalghia, he sought neither political commentary nor psychological realism, but a cinematic prayer for reconnection with memory, faith and human compassion.
Watching the film today, its power remains undiminished precisely because it refuses easy interpretation. It asks viewers not to solve it but to inhabit it. Like the lingering echo of distant church bells or mist settling over an empty field, its meaning unfolds long after the final image has faded. Few directors have trusted the audience so completely; fewer still have created works that reward such trust with such inexhaustible beauty.
Within Tarkovsky’s extraordinary body of work, Nostalghia stands as the quiet heart of his late career: less immediately astonishing than Stalker, less emotionally direct than Mirror, yet perhaps his most complete expression of exile as a spiritual state. It is a film that does not simply depict longing—it becomes longing itself, preserving in every rain-soaked image the fragile hope that memory, faith and art might together illuminate even the loneliest path home.
NOW in CURZON CINEMAS Uk
Documentary wise: Ebs Burnough’s The Capote Tapes takes us back through the archives to revisit the iconic American novelist, while Nanni Moretti’s Santiago, Italia (left) explores the Italian role in rescuing exiles out of Chile after Pinochet’s Coup d’Etat. 
Women filmmakers will be also championed in Mark Cousins’ 2018 epic homage to the history of female talent: Women Make Film:
Diva, grande dame and femme fatale, Stanwyck adapted to any genre, be it comedy, melodrama or thriller. Her natural wit and raw emotion was particularly resonant in her Westerns, where she played resourceful, confident women holding their own in a male-dominated world. The BFI are screening 3 examples in March. Her first western Annie Oakley (George Stevens, 1935) was based on the life of ‘Little Miss Sureshot,’ one of the most famous sharpshooters in American history; Stanwyck oozes confidence in her portrayal of the determined and spirited protagonist. Cecil B. DeMille brought a characteristically epic sense of scale to the western with Union Pacific (1939), about the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad. Mixed in with the historical elements is a love triangle between a troubleshooter, a gambler, and a train engineer’s daughter played by Stanwyck. The director was mesmerised by her performance, and she became one of his favourite stars. In Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957), a late-career highlight for Stanwyck, she portrays a wealthy landowner exerting influence over an Arizonian township by commanding a staff of 40 men. Beautifully shot and packed with psychosexual subtext and directed with bravura, Samuel Fuller’s western influenced a generation of filmmakers, including Godard.
The Closing Night Gala, Eric Barbier’s Promise At Dawn will take place on 22 November at Curzon Mayfair and stars Pierre Niney with Charlotte Gainsbourg (Best Actress Cesar Nomination) playing the overbearing Jewish mother in a powerful adaptation of Romain Gary’s memoir.
s such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries(1957), and ground-breaking TV series like Scenes From a Marriage (1973) to lesser known titles, and those scripted by Bergman and directed by his collaborators. All in all more than 50 films directed or written by Bergman, as well as several TV series, will screen at the BFI accompanied by an ambitious events programme, designed to bring Bergman and his work to life for a new generation. This will include discussions, immersive experiences and talent-led events.
Danish director Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Ordet) is known for his austere and minimalist features. 
