Ivan’s Childhood

“The most auspicious debut in Soviet cinema in the 35 years since Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike” (J. Hoberman, New York Times), Tarkovsky’s breathtakingly lyrical first feature announced the thematic preoccupations, visual motifs, and aesthetic strategies of one of the most visionary film artists of our time. Praised by Jean-Paul Sartre as a work of “Socialist surrealism”, and co-winner (with Zurlini’s Family Diary) of the Golden Lion at Venice in 1962, Ivan’s Childhood concerns a 12-year-old Russian war orphan whose zealous desire to avenge the death of his parents spurs him on to increasingly dangerous espionage missions behind German lines. Here in germinal form are the otherworldly landscapes, dream sequences, memory flashbacks, and mystical religiosity of the ever-more-hallucinatory Tarkovsky universe. Few films have captured war’s annihilation of childhood innocence with more power and pure cinematic poetry. “A magisterial debut” (Ian Christie). “The opening, where Ivan soars through the trees in a reverie of lost childhood, is a remarkable prophecy of things (from other worlds) to come” (Toronto I.F.F.). B&W, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 90 mins.