Life of director Andrei Tarkovsky celebrated in new TV series by Kirill Serebrennikov

A new TV show taking on the life of the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky is currently being developed in Russia.

The series will be written and directed by Russian theatre and film director Kirill Serebrennikov, and produced by Moscow-based studio Hype Film.

Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of world cinema, Tarkovsky had a prolific career Soviet Union. His films Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979) all featured in the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight & Sound’s 2020 list of the 100 greatest films of all time. While working abroad in 1984, the director declared he would not return to the Soviet Union, becoming a refugee and cutting himself off from his son, who was unable to leave Russia.

Serebrennikov, who rose to prominence as the artistic director of the Gogol Arts Centre in Moscow, was arrested in 2017 and put under house arrest under claims of embezzlement, a charge widely considered as politically motivated. In 2019, a Russian court ordered Serebrennikov’s release.