What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as sculpting in time.
Andrei Tarkovsky
B: 1932 / N: Russian

Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky made films about why life is worth living and why death is worth dying. He took up the mantle of locating meaning in the evanescence of existence, whether through confirming the presence of an obscure, spiritual higher power (1966's Andrei Rublev), speculating on our complex relationship with the untapped cosmos (1972's Solaris), or merely reflecting (as in 1979's Stalker) our collective desire to find a secret place of infinite knowledge and understanding that will allow us to answer the one true question: why? In his later films, he shifted away from contemplating matters metaphysical to focus on stories that emulate human memory and our perception of time (1975's Mirror and 1983's Nostalgia). In his 1985 book Sculpting in Time, he drilled down into his creative impulses and waxed philosophical about the power of the camera as a piece of heavy machinery that can be used to make art through minutely calibrated (and intellectually invested) montage and framing. All his later inspirational and aesthetically dazzling achievements were foreshadowed in his 1962 debut proper, Ivan's Childhood, a deceptively conventional drama about a 12-year-old boy acting as a messenger on the Russian front during World War II. From its opening dream sequence onwards, Tarkovsky daintily chips away at time with his trusty arsenal of tools, obsessed by the fragility of human consciousness in a world rife with torments and reasons to lose faith in it all.