Aleksandr Sokurov (“Russian Ark”) crafts a loving tribute to his friend and compatriot, the great Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky (“The Mirror,” “Solaris,” “Nostalghia,” The Sacrifice”), in this visually poetic and affecting documentary. Drawing on film clips and archival footage of Tarkovsky at work honing scripts and setting up his famously intricate shots with collaborators like cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Sokurov reflects on this creative visionary’s extraordinary drive and frequent run-ins with a repressive Soviet bureaucracy that eventually forced his exile to Western Europe.

Sokurov’s meditative and highly personal film is an elegant and elegiac valentine to one of world cinema’s most celebrated and uncompromising luminaries. We not only get a vivid sense of Tarkovsky’s life, process, and unique artistic sensibility, all set against the backdrop of traumatic political events in the Soviet Union, but also how keenly Sokurov felt the absence of his mentor upon news of his untimely death.