In the first portion of the evening, acclaimed painter and expatriate, Dimitri Kozyrev will present a personal introduction to the great Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky. Kozyrev will discuss his experience growing up in the USSR with the cinema of Tarkovsky, and the director’s continuing influence on his own painting practice. We will follow with a screening of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The film depicts an expedition to a mysterious site known as “The Zone”, which has the supposed potential to fulfill a person’s innermost desires. Exquisite in form (comprised of only 142 finely articulated shots), Stalker is a haunting masterwork that depicts a world of post-apocalyptic misery, a premonition of Chernobyl and Soviet disintegration. Stalker is arguably one of cinema’s purest articulation of the film as spiritual quest.