To  : Nostalghia.com
From: RusCiCo
Date: 26 August 2002

Dear Sirs,

It was a pleasure to learn how many people around the globe appreciate Andrey Tarkovsky's art, and value his heritage. Thank you for your attentive and critical review of our work. After studying your remarks on our MIRROR DVD we have decided to include in our future Tarkovsky's films DVD releases not only remastered Dolby Digital 5.1 track, but also original mono one.

Never-the-less I need to mention that all our work was inspired by deep respect to our great compatriot. For us Andrey Arsenyevich is alive. We all grew up with his films, and a few of us have been lucky to meet with him in person. By the way, our office is just a hundred meters away from his house.

Our sound restoration was supervised by Edward Artemyev, MIRROR composer. He had a few remarks, and we made all the necessary changes, however he didn't see anything wrong with the episodes you mention in your review. We all realize that remastering mono to Dolby Digital 5.1 it's impossible to preserve exactly the same sound. This supposes certain creativity, and we think Tarkovsky might have agreed with the sound version contained on our disc. Moreover, we all know he never stopped developing his views.

Bach's organ prelude, which is heard over the opening credits, stops exactly at the same place as in the original phonogram we have worked with. In other episodes you have mentioned the sound level might be a bit higher than in the original, but we suppose it doesn't prevent the viewer from comprehending the director's idea of the scene. The sound track was scrupulously and carefully remastered by a professional who loves Tarkovsky's films and knows every frame of his pictures. I guess, he had the right to his own understanding of every particular scene.

What concerns the video in the episodes, which in your opinion should be darker, we did everything to preserve the feeling of darkness not loosing a singular detail. We think every detail, including background, was very important.

We have shown our Tarkovsky's films DVDs to many people who closely knew him and worked with him. These were his sister Marina, photography director Yusov, composers Artemyev and Ovchinnikov, director Tsymbal, production designer Safiulin, actors Natalia Bondarchuk and Yury Nazarov. All of them appreciated and appraised our work and marked the creative approach of all the RUSCICO team to producing DVD versions of Tarkovsky's works.

Sincerely Yours,

Ramis Gainulin

RUSCICO