The Sacrifice is Andrei Tarkovsky's final masterpiece. The film was shot in Sweden, during the summer of 1985, while Tarkovsky was in exile; it turned out to be his final testament, urging each individual to take personal responsibility for everything that happens in the world. Day after day, while the film was being made, Layla Alexander-Garrett - Tarkovsky's on-site interpreter - kept a diary which forms the basis of her award-winning book Andrei Tarkovsky: The Collector Of Dreams. In this book the great director is portrayed as a real, living person: tormented, happy, inexhaustibly kind but at times harsh, unrelenting, conscience-stricken and artistically unfulfilled.