The Sacrifice

Tarkovsky made his last film in Swedish exile, with Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman's actor Erland Josephson and Bergman's island of Gotland standing in for the setting. He was diagnosed with cancer as the edit finished and died before the year was out. It took the Grand Prix and a third FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1986; his son collected them.

Alexander, a former actor turned lecturer, is spending his birthday at the family's house by the sea with his wife, his daughter, a doctor and a postman with an interest in Nietzsche. Aircraft pass low; the water in the glasses trembles; a broadcast informs them of what has started. Alexander, who has spent the day telling his mute young son that words are worthless, offers God everything he has — his house, his family, his speech — if the day can be undone. Nykvist shot it in long, drifting takes in bleached colour and monochrome, including a nine-minute unbroken shot at the end of the film that required the set to be rebuilt after the first attempt failed.

It is the most explicitly religious of Tarkovsky's films and the most divisive; the Vatican later put it on a list of forty-five great films. Read alongside Nostalghia, it completes an argument he had been making since Andrei Rublev — that faith is not a belief but an action taken without any expectation of being answered.