He wasn’t a dissident, notes the narrator of Chris Marker’s eloquent paean to and exegesis of the life of visionary Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. He was a stranger to this world. All the more reason for him to be harassed and repressed throughout his brief life (he died in exile in 1986, at the age of 53) by ignorant and paranoid regimes. Nonetheless, as no less than the deceased Boris Pasternak predicted in a séance, he would make seven films that would change the way some would look at cinema, and the world, forever.

No lightweight in the ranks of world cinema himself, Marker interweaves scenes from Tarkovsky’s films with videos in which he directs his final film, The Sacrifice (1986), and lies in a hospital bed suffering from the brain cancer that would kill him; the idea is that these works and days are all part of a single defiant utterance. A true artist, Tarkovsky sought to create an imaginary realm — as represented by the Zone in Stalker (1979), the icons in Andrei Rublev (1966), the mystic ocean in Solaris (1972), and the secret, world-saving bargain in The Sacrifice — that other strangers to this world might recognize as home.