The second of four feature film portraits of European artists, starring Anatoly Solonitsin, Nikolai Sergeyev.

Fifteenth-century icon painter Andrei Rublev, one of the world's great artists, lived through the most turbulent period of Russia's chaotic history. Tarkovsky's epic film shown tonight for the first time in Britain in its full-length, original version, traces his artistic development through his relationship with another great painter, Theophanes the Greek, in the context of feudal violence surrounding them. Unlike Theophanes, Rublev painted man as essentially good, with a tenderness untainted by sentimentality.