Unlike Abbas Kiarostami, a poet of contemporary cinema whose films stopped being about Iran when he stopped making films there, Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia’s preeminent poet of the spirit, proved that while a Russian director could leave his homeland in the name of artistic freedom, he could still be imprisoned by the memories he took with him.

In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky wrote that he wanted Nostalghia, his first film after leaving Russia to escape censorship, to be “about the particular state of mind which assails Russians who are far from their native land.” Shot in Italy and written by Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, the film explores this acute form of nostalgia through a spiritually wearied poet, Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovskiy), who’s traveled to Italy to research the life of a composer who studied in Bologna during the late 1700s before returning to Russia to hang himself.