In 2007, in the year of Andrei Tarkovsky's 75th birthday, the government of the Ivanovo region, with the support of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Culture of our country, the State Film Fund and the Union of Cinematographers, decided to hold the Zerkalo film festival. The director's sister Marina took an active part in organizing the event.
According to the Russian film director and People's Artist of Russia Pavel Lungin, President of the Film Festival, 2012 is a special year for Zerkal. It is 80 years since the birth of Andrei Tarkovsky and 40 years since he received the "Palm Branch" for the film "Solaris" at the Cannes Film Festival. For this reason, the organizers tried to expand the film festival dedicated to the director, make it more significant, and raise his prestige at the world level.
The traditional program of the film festival, which takes place in different localities of the Ivanovo region, includes an international competition of feature films, contests for animation films and student films, as well as special screenings and retrospectives. About 150 films are shown at the festival every year. Over fifty creative meetings are organized. The "Mirror" is visited by about 25 thousand people.
From May 29 to June 3, 2012, the VI Zerkalo Film Festival was held in the cities of Ples and Ivanovo. The opening ceremony on the Volga embankment was held by an active participant in each of the festivals - the Governor of the Ivanovo region, Mikhail Men. He noted that from this year the "start" of the festival will take place in the picturesque historical Ples near the great river. Thanks to this, residents of the large city of Ivanovo, the regional center, will not have problems due to blocked roads.
Film critic Andrei Plakhov became the new program director of Zerkala, and Alexey Bokov took over the post of special producer of the film festival. The French actress Carole Bouquet was chosen as the chairman of the jury in the summer of 2012.
To attract the attention of young people to serious films, master classes for future directors were held within the framework of the sixth Zerkalo festival. In addition, an artistic reading of the still unpublished script by Andrei Tarkovsky "Antarctica - a distant country" (1964 version with the director's notes) took place.
