About

Mirror is Tarkovsky’s deeply personal reflection on the associative processes of thought, memory and dreams, filtered through recollections of his mother and his childhood. It reveals an interior world while also refracting through his family history the upheavals in Soviet society from the 1930s to 1970s. Poetic visions of childhood are juxtaposed with stark newsreel images of war, military mobilisation and disaster. The director’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky, reads his own poems in the film, while his mother appears as the protagonist’s mother in old age and actress Margarita Terekhova plays both his wife and his younger mother. Kathryn Weir