“Nostalghia” (ノスタルジア), Original Japanese Re-Release Movie Poster 2003, Andrei Tarkovsky, B2 Size (c. 51.5 × 72.8 cm) S6

This is an original Japanese B2 theatrical re-release poster produced for the 2003 revival of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (ノスタルジア), his extraordinary 1983 meditation on exile, memory, faith and spiritual displacement.

The film stars Oleg Yankovsky as Andrei Gorchakov, a Russian writer travelling through Italy while researching the life of an expatriate composer, together with Domiziana Giordano as his interpreter Eugenia and Erland Josephson as Domenico, an isolated visionary convinced that humanity has lost its spiritual direction.

The 2003 campaign presented Nostalghia to a new generation as one of the great achievements of late-20th-century art cinema. The poster’s own vertical Japanese copy captures that retrospective positioning:

「タルコフスキーが21世紀に遺した至宝」

“A treasure Tarkovsky left to the 21st century.”

It is an unusually restrained and elegant re-release design, allowing one of the film’s most extraordinary images to carry almost the entire composition.

Film background

Nostalghia was Tarkovsky’s first feature made outside the Soviet Union and was filmed in Italy in collaboration with screenwriter Tonino Guerra.

Its protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, has travelled from Moscow to Italy to investigate Pavel Sosnovsky, an 18th-century Russian composer who lived abroad before returning to his homeland.

Yet the research journey gradually becomes something far more internal.

Gorchakov experiences an increasingly profound estrangement from his surroundings and an overwhelming longing for Russia. His memories, dreams and physical environment begin to merge, while his encounter with the troubled Domenico leads him toward one of Tarkovsky’s most famous acts of faith and endurance.

The film’s title describes something deeper than ordinary nostalgia. For Tarkovsky, it refers to a specifically painful form of spiritual homesickness—the inability to reconcile physical displacement with one’s memory of home.

The film received major recognition at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, including the Grand Prix du cinéma de création, further establishing Tarkovsky as one of the defining filmmakers of world cinema.

Design

The poster is dominated by the film’s celebrated final image.

In the foreground, Gorchakov sits beside a pool of water with a German Shepherd lying quietly beside him. Behind them stands a modest Russian wooden house, apparently transplanted into the Italian landscape.

Surrounding that intimate scene are the enormous ruined walls of the Abbey of San Galgano.

The image is one of Tarkovsky’s most famous visual constructions.

Russia and Italy—memory and reality, homeland and exile—occupy the same impossible physical space.

The Russian dacha does not simply appear as a flashback. It exists within the Italian ruin itself, as though Gorchakov’s interior world has finally overtaken geography.

This single image therefore condenses virtually the entire film.

The composition is deliberately muted: damp greens, grey-blue stone, brown earth and pale mist create an atmosphere of stillness and melancholy. Nothing is aggressively saturated, allowing the landscape to feel suspended somewhere between physical reality and recollection.

The vertical Japanese campaign line appears discreetly against the dark trees at upper right, leaving Tarkovsky’s image almost entirely unobstructed.

Typography

Across the lower edge of the photograph appears the international title:

NOSTALGHIA

set in a refined white serif typeface.

Directly beneath is the understated original credit block:

“un film di ANDREY TARKOVSKY”

together with the principal production and cast credits.

The broad cream lower field gives the composition an almost gallery-like quality, separating the photographic image from the Japanese title device below.

At lower right, ノスタルジア appears on what looks like a torn fragment of paper, its uneven scorched-looking edge introducing a fragile, handmade element into an otherwise highly controlled layout.

The device can be read almost like a fragment of a letter, notebook page or surviving memory—particularly appropriate for a film concerned with distance, loss and remembrance.

Tarkovsky and the final image

Few filmmakers used architecture and landscape as psychologically as Andrei Tarkovsky.

Throughout Nostalghia, water, abandoned buildings, mist, ruined interiors and reflections are repeatedly used to dissolve the conventional boundary between physical place and internal memory.

The final image represented on this poster is perhaps the film’s ultimate expression of that approach.

The ruined Gothic abbey surrounds the Russian house like an enormous shell, while the small human figure and dog remain almost motionless in the foreground.

Tarkovsky then reveals that the apparently intimate landscape exists within something monumental and impossible.

The effect is simultaneously comforting and devastating: home has returned, but only as an image contained within exile.

For collectors of Tarkovsky material, this makes the poster especially appealing because its design is built around one of the director’s most recognisable and thematically complete images rather than conventional portrait advertising.

The B2 format

Measuring approximately 51.5 × 72.8 cm, the Japanese B2 was the standard theatrical poster format used by Japanese cinemas.

The vertical proportions are particularly suited to this design. The abbey walls and misty landscape occupy the upper field, while the generous cream space beneath creates an elegant visual pause before the Japanese title.

The result feels closer to an exhibition poster than conventional commercial film advertising—an approach entirely appropriate to Tarkovsky’s cinema.

Condition

Excellent+ condition overall.

The poster is exceptionally well preserved, with strong photographic detail, clean typography and excellent tonal balance throughout the muted green, brown and grey palette.

The large cream lower section remains notably clean, while the delicate white NOSTALGHIA lettering and small production credits remain crisp and clearly defined.

There are no prominent fold lines, pinholes or major display defects visible. Only very light age-related handling and subtle natural paper character can be seen on close inspection.

The reverse is also remarkably clean, with minimal evidence of storage or handling.

Please review all photographs carefully; they show the exact poster for sale, front and reverse.

This is an original Japanese B2 theatrical poster from the film’s 2003 re-release campaign.

It is not a reproduction or modern reprint.

It is approximately 23 years old.

Certificate of Authenticity included.