After training for over five years at the VGIK film school, Tarkovsky started film making through the Soviet Mosfilm studio system, which enabled him to make films that would not have been commercially viable in the West. However the Orthodox Christian symbolism in them often led to interference and occasionally suppression by the Soviet authorities. In 1984, after shooting Nostalghia in Italy, he decided not to return to Russia. He made only one more film, The Sacrifice, before dying of cancer in the suburb of Paris at the age of 54.
Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting...