Tarkovsky by Trakovsky

Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский

Our latest project literally walked in off the street one day.

A recent UC Santa Cruz graduate, a Russian American kid named Dmitry called one afternoon recently to ask for advice. He wanted to know how to get his film post produced and into film festivals. [Oh god, not another film student first-time filmmaker...looking for free advice, somehow always available.] Time for tough love. "Forget it...don't bother...don't waste my time."

Except.

This kid wasn't calling about a hypothetical film. He'd actually already gone out and spent a year shooting, editing, and writing and recording his voiceover and made a perfectly presentable DVD screener...with original cover art. I was impressed. Dmitry takes us on a mission to learn who Tarkovksy is, and what the filmmaker meant when he asked in his long long films if death really exists.

And get this...he's not even a film student. Former pre-med.

So I watched [selectively] his screener, and we figured out what else needed to be done to raise it to the next professional level. Oh and I'm a UCSC alum too, and I am 75% Russian-American. But I freely admitted to Dmitry that Solaris put me to sleep when I first saw it when I worked as a projectionist in an arthouse cinema in the early 70s. (I liked Space Oddity more) And I had a hard time with Andrei Rublev when I got around to watching it in the 90s.

The new 90 minute film is called "Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky..." ballsy title considering that Tarkovsky died when young Dmitry was just 1.

Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (the filmmaker's site)

http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=34

http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=164