Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, 1983’s gorgeously haunting Nostalghia, also marked new territory for the director. His first film made outside the USSR, the Cannes Best Director winner (a prize he shared with Robert Bresson for L’Argent), was also a unique collaboration with writer Tonino Guerra, frequent collaborator of Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Francesco Rosi. Now restored in 4K in 2022 by CSC – Cinetecanazionale in collaboration with Rai Cinema at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original negatives and the original soundtrack preserved at Rai Cinema, the restoration will begin rolling out on February 21 at NYC’s Film Forum via Kino Lorber and we’re pleased to exclusively unveil the trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “Andrei Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word ‘nostalghia’ conveys ‘the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.’ This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky, The Mirror), a Russian intellectual doing research in Italy. He becomes obsessed with the Botticelli-like beauty of his translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), as well as with the apocalyptic ramblings of a self-destructive wanderer named Domenico (Erland Josephson, The Sacrifice). Written with frequent Michelangelo Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra (L’Avventura) and newly restored in 4K from the original camera negative, Nostalghia is a mystical and mysterious collision of East and West, shot with the tactile beauty that only Tarkovsky can provide. As J. Hoberman wrote, ‘Nostalghia is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours.'”
“My wish was simply to observe a Russian who comes to Italy and discovers unexpected emotions which regard him,” Tarvovsky said following the film’s premiere. “Of course, the same thing would have happened if I had gone to Africa, or who knows where else. This man does not understand the reason for the barriers between countries. He does not accept the artificial conventions that wish to render men different from each other. And all of this naturally provokes attrocious suffering in him. Even a child, if you ask him what we should do to understand each other better, will answer that we need to open the frontiers. Of course, it is a naive and idealistic answer, but a basically just one: the drama emerges precisely from this clash between this innocent vision of the world and the real conditions of life for a man who is away from his country.”
See the exclusive trailer and poster below.
Nostalghia will open at NYC’s Film Forum on February 21 and expand.