I first saw “The Sacrifice” when I was taking an art film class at Wheaton. It was one of the first films that I saw that I can remeber stiring a desire for seperating films from movies. Tarkovsky made such an incredible inpact on filmmaking considering he only made 7 feature films in 27 years. Senses of Cinema did a great write up on him…

Andrei Tarkovsky is almost certainly the most famous Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein. His visionary approach to cinematic time and space, as well as his commitment to cinema as poetry, mark his oeuvre as one of the defining moments in the development of the modern art film. Although he never tackled politics directly, the metaphysical preoccupations of films such as Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979) provoked ongoing hostility from the Soviet authorities. 

Andrei Tarkovsky at Senses of Cinema