Nostalgia

Nostalgia (1983) is Andrei Tarkovsky's Italian-shot drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov roams the Tuscan countryside researching an exiled 18th-century serf composer who once lived there.

Trailed by his interpreter Eugenia, Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) sinks into a homesickness he cannot shake and a homeland he cannot return to. In a fog-bound spa town he meets Domenico, a recluse played by Erland Josephson and obsessed with saving humanity. Domenico hands him an odd task: carry a lit candle across a drained pool without letting it go out. Tarkovsky films the attempt in a single unbroken shot that lasts several minutes, and it became the picture's signature.

Tarkovsky made this film just as he stopped returning to the Soviet Union, and his own exile bleeds into every slow frame. It shared the directing prize at Cannes. This is patient, meditative cinema for viewers ready to sit with long takes and silence in place of plot. Stream Nostalgia (1983) online on iFILM.