To capture the bleak atmosphere of a toxic wasteland for Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky shot near a polluted river beside the ruins of a chemical plant. Years later he, his wife and his lead actor died of the same rare cancer, and the film's sound designer blamed the location. This deep dive explores the life of a director who treated cinema as a religion, beginning with a childhood shaped by a poet father who abandoned the family, wartime evacuation to a rural town where the young Andrei saved his mother from drowning, and months in a hospital bed with tuberculosis. A drifting student who dropped out of Arabic studies, he found clarity on a year-long geological expedition in the Siberian taiga.

The episode follows his rise during the Khrushchev thaw, the Venice prize for Ivan's Childhood in 1962, and the escalating war with Soviet authorities o ...