To capture the bleak atmosphere of a toxic wasteland for Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky shot near a polluted river beside the ruins of a chemical plant. Years later he, his wife and his lead actor died of the same rare cancer, and the film’s sound designer blamed the location. This deep dive explores the life of a director who treated cinema as a religion, beginning with a childhood shaped by a poet father who abandoned the family, wartime evacuation to a rural town where the young Andrei saved his mother from drowning, and months in a hospital bed with tuberculosis. A drifting student who dropped out of Arabic studies, he found clarity on a year-long geological expedition in the Siberian taiga.

The episode follows his rise during the Khrushchev thaw, the Venice prize for Ivan’s Childhood in 1962, and the escalating war with Soviet authorities over Andrei Rublev and Mirror, which was given a third category classification that starved it of theaters and funding. It explains his philosophy of sculpting in time through long, unbroken takes designed to push viewers past boredom into a meditative state, his distrust of color film, and his surprising love of Star Wars. It covers the ruined Stalker negatives, his 1978 heart attack, Soviet lobbying against Nostalgia at Cannes, his 1984 decision never to return, the son held behind the Iron Curtain, and completing The Sacrifice while dying of lung cancer.

• How childhood trauma became the visual grammar of his films
• Why a Soviet superpower feared slow, poetic movies about memory
• The campfire logic behind holding a shot until resistance breaks down
• Why an artist who despised Western commercialism admired Star Wars
• The posthumous Lenin Prize and a minor planet named in his honor