MIRROR

Andrei Tarkovsky kept having these recurring dreams about his childhood home. So he rebuilt it to make MIRROR. He had the wooden house reconstructed on its original foundations and the neighbouring fields replanted with the buckwheat he remembered growing there.

That should give you some idea of how personal this film is.

MIRROR moves between childhood, wartime and adulthood through the recollections of a man looking back over his life. An absent father, a mother waiting, an argument with an ex-wife and memories of the countryside return in fragments. Dreams interrupt recollections. Newsreel footage places private experiences alongside the history unfolding around them. Tarkovsky’s father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, reads his own poems on the soundtrack.

At the centre is Margarita Terekhova, playing both the narrator’s mother and his estranged wife. The same boy appears as the narrator in childhood and as his son. These choices make the family relationships especially affecting: the people closest to him carry the same faces of the people he remembers, while his own behaviour raises questions about what he's inherited versus what he's passing on.

There's extraordinary beauty here, in the burning barn, the movement of wind across a field and the attention paid to rooms and faces. Familiar things become difficult to leave behind. Tarkovsky keeps returning to them with the intensity of someone trying to remember exactly how it felt to be there.

For all its intimacy, MIRROR reached far beyond Tarkovsky’s own family. Viewers wrote to him describing the shock of recognising their own lives in his images. I was reading that one woman from Novosibirsk told him that the things that tormented, comforted and sustained her were all there in his film. He had gone to remarkable lengths to reconstruct his own past. Little did he realise other people found theirs in it.

And as for those recurring dreams I mentioned? Tarkovsky said that once he’d made the film, he stopped dreaming about his childhood home. That’s a lot of work for a little catharsis, but I guess we all have our methods.