New Restoration

“A magnificent experience: watching it, you can feel Tarkovsky’s life ebbing, but with vitality, dignity, candour, concern, and, most of all, artistry—‘with hope and confidence.’”

Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail

Armageddon is imminent in Russian mystic and master Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, described by the director as a meditation on​“the absence in our culture of room for spiritual experience.” Made in Sweden with members of Ingmar Bergman’s team, the film is set on an island where Alexander (Erland Josephson), a man of letters, lives in idyllic semi-retirement. The apple of his eye is his young son, who represents for Alexander the great hope of the future. When that future is threatened by an unthinkable cataclysm, Alexander strikes a bargain that tests the limits of belief—a decision possibly based in madness, holiness, or occult trust. (Tarkovsky’s original title for the film was The Witch.) This new restoration by the Swedish Film Institute premiered at the Berlinale following our 2023 Tarkovsky retrospective. Its faithful rendering of the film’s lighting design and colour composition provides another chance to witness the conclusion to Tarkovsky’s intense and transfixing art.

In Swedish with English subtitles

“The burning house of The Sacrifice [represents] not only the culmination of Tarkovsky’s final film but of his life and work as a whole … Every gift is also a sacrifice, says Otto to Alexander; otherwise what sort of a gift would it be? By the same token The Sacrifice is also a gift, a testament which shines with the brightness of a final willed self-transfiguration.”

Gino Moliterno, Senses of Cinema
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