Before he made an international splash with his epic-length, groundbreaking films like Andrei Rublev (1966) and Solaris (1972), director Andrei Tarkovsky made an auspicious debut on the international festival scene with Ivan's Childhood, which opened in the Soviet Union in 1962 and won several awards that year at the Venice Film Festival including the Golden Lion, best director and best actor for young Nikolay "Kolya" Burlyaev. A graduate of the auspicious Soviet film school Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, better known as the VGIK, he would soon be cited by filmmaker Ingmar Bergman as his favorite director and experienced numerous challenges in his home country, which led to his defection in 1982 while making Nostalghia.

Based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov written four years earlier under the simpler title of "Ivan," this film was already a prospective production when it was handed to first-timer Tarkovsky to develop along with fellow filmmaker and friend Andrey Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky. The story charts the harrowing experiences of orphaned Ivan (Burlyaev) enlisted as a spy by the Russian army during World War II. Thirsting for revenge after the deaths of his parents at the hands of German troops, he relates his story during an interrogation to a young officer, Lieutenant Galtsev (Evgeny Zharikov), who continues to follow the boy's fate at the conclusion of the war.

Born in 1946 (less than a year after the end of World War II), Burlyaev was already a seasoned stage actor when he won the leading role in this film following a key role in The Boy and the Pigeon (1961). An impressed Tarkovsky would use him again in Andrei Rublev (which was banned for three years by Soviet authorities), and the young actor would go on to become a distinguished figure in the country's film community as founder and director of the Moscow Film Festival of Slavic and Orthodox Peoples as well as its sister cinematographic association. The Tarkovsky connection would also continue on a more personal level when he married actress and director Natalya Bondarchuk, star of Solaris and daughter of renowned director Sergei Bondarchuk (War and Peace, 1966).

A Mosfilm production, Ivan's Childhood was acquired by distributor Sig Shore under the U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange program and entitled My Name Is Ivan for its first American release in 1963 under the banner of Shore International. At many screenings the film was preceded by the short film "Blind Gary Davis," an 11-minute documentary by Sea of Love director Harold Becker about the legendary African-American blues singer and guitarist.

Though widely regarded as both a classic and a key film in the history of modern Soviet film, English-language reviews for the film were decidedly mixed and it wasn't chosen as a nominee for Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards after it was submitted. The Motion Picture Herald remarked, "There is a moving and warm story told here, the story of all wars, the story of all children, in a sense, and the devastating effects of war on the youngsters." Likewise, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times commented, "Beauty, poetry and sadness are certainly lodged in its brief dramatic span, to be seized and embraced by anyone who will give a compassionate mind to it."

On the other hand, Variety was underwhelmed and found that "some place along the line, the whole thing was sidetracked and muddled so badly that the climax is about as exciting as a lullaby." Perhaps the harshest (and most curiously xenophobic) opinion came from The New Republic: "The Russians continue to produce evidence of their cinematic deterioration. Some future cultural anthropologist (Chinese, perhaps) will be able to document from the post-war Soviet film the fattening of Soviet self-regard, the diminution of national dynamics, and - especially - the petrification of patriotic fervor into arty attitudes."

In subsequent years the film's status has remained cemented in the international film community with many directors ranging from Miloš Forman to Jim Jarmusch citing it as an influence. It also inspired Los Angeles-based painter Kirsten Everberg, who designed an entire series of paintings based on the film exhibited at the 1301PE Gallery. ""I gravitated toward the film's imagery of the present," she remarked in an interview about the film, "such as the birch trees, and to Tarkovsky's use of light, which is very much a painter's light. With beautiful, shimmering moments of impressionist illumination, the figure-ground relationships decompose." Indeed, it remains both a haunting and striking introduction to the director's work as well as a powerful viewing experience regardless of how familiar one may be with its significance in the world cinema canon.

By Nathaniel Thompson