Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a drama about Andrei Gorchakov, a Russian poet travelling through Italy to research the life of an eighteenth-century Russian composer who lived and worked there. Accompanied by his interpreter Eugenia, he finds the foreign country increasingly alienating, and his preoccupation with the composer's homesickness mirrors his own. In the town of Bagno Vignoni he meets Domenico, a man regarded locally as mad, who asks him to perform a particular act of faith on his behalf. Oleg Yankovskiy plays Gorchakov, with Domiziana Giordano as Eugenia and Erland Josephson as Domenico.

Andrei Tarkovsky directed and co-wrote the film with Tonino Guerra; Daniel Toscan du Plantier produced this Italian-Soviet co-production. It was the sixth of the seven features Tarkovsky directed, between Stalker (1979) and The Sacrifice (1986), and it belongs to the period he spent working outside the Soviet Union. Its themes of exile, memory and the difficulty of belonging to one place while longing for another run through the whole film, which unfolds at a slow pace and makes heavy use of memory and landscape.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.9 out of 10 from roughly thirty-three thousand votes, and on TMDB it stands at 7.8 from a much smaller number of ratings, which suggests a widely admired film with a modest but appreciative following. Its critics' rating is higher, at 8.3 from twenty-five reviews.