"This is art inspired by art, created by an artist and about an artists artistic metamorphoses.

Once in the 1400th Century the monk and icon painter Andrej Rublev leaves his peaceful and secluded life in a monastery and embarks on a personal voyage through medieval Moscow in search for inspiration and wisdom. The moralistic, innocent and idealistic painter has been protected from the darkest sides of humanity for a long time, but on his journey he is faces real evil for the first time in his life. This encounter challenges his ideals, his view on mankind and his faith in his religion and art.

In Tarkovskij's second feature after his debut "Ivans Childhood" (1962) he focuses for the first time on the topics that world characterize his filmography and distinctively demonstrates his cinematic expertise. Within the many long takes that often are without any dialog or sound, the director moves his camera in tact with the characters movements and films them from long distances, frog perspective and bird perspective. Time is here as in all of his films crucial to his innovating narrative style and mostly very subtle. The dialog is searching and philosophical, and if one devotes to Tarkovskij's universe, as he wants us to, time vanishes from ones consciousness and a feeling of being hypnotized will most lightly occur. The films main character is embodied with humanity and meditating expressions by Anatoli Solonitsyn who also appeared in Tarkovskij's "Solaris" (1972), "Mirror" (1975) and "Stalker" (1979).

"Andrej Rublev" is a profound psychological exploration of an artists conflicts concerning his faith in life, art and religion, an allegory about mans confrontation with the world, mans relation to the world and the consequences this meeting has for man. This monumental work is as archetypal as any film can be and can from my subjective point-of-view best be describe as an instructive, non-figurative, esoteric, mystifying, morally strict, poetic, existentialistic, symbolic, spiritual, visually beautiful and close to prophetic expression from a great humanist that viewed the horse as a symbol of the meaning of life."