THE SACRIFICE

THE SACRIFICE was Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, made while he was living in exile from the Soviet Union and seriously ill with lung cancer. The story follows Alexander, a former actor and intellectual, who offers to give up everything he loves if an impending global catastrophe can be averted. Tarkovsky presents this not as a heroic gesture, but as a private, desperate act of faith, shaped by fear, belief, and moral responsibility.

The film was shot in Sweden with several key collaborators closely associated with Ingmar Bergman. Erland Josephson, a longtime Bergman actor, delivers a restrained and deeply internal performance at the film’s centre. Cinematography was handled by Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s most trusted visual collaborator, whose natural light and precise framing give the film its austere beauty. Production designer Anna Asp, another Bergman regular, helped shape the sparse interiors and ritualised spaces that define the film’s physical world.

Tarkovsky’s working methods were famously demanding. One of the film’s most legendary moments, the burning of the house in a single uninterrupted shot, had to be filmed twice after a technical failure destroyed the first take. The second attempt exhausted cast and crew, and Tarkovsky reportedly collapsed shortly afterward. As with Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO, whose turbulent production was documented in BURDEN OF DREAMS, the making of THE SACRIFICE was also captured on film through interviews conducted with Tarkovsky during production, offering rare insight into his mindset as he worked against time and illness.

On release, THE SACRIFICE divided critics. Some found it austere and impenetrable. Others recognised it as the culmination of Tarkovsky’s lifelong engagement with faith, sacrifice, and spiritual endurance. Today, it is widely regarded as a farewell work, a filmmaker asking what belief costs when certainty, and time itself, are running out.

This is the first Andrei Tarkovsky film we’ve shown at FOMO Secret Cinema in over a year. Not because we don’t admire his work, but because his filmography is so varied and important I could never bring myself to pick one so kept putting off. I’ve finally bit the bullet and in typical FOMO fashion, do everything backwards by starting with his final film.