*200 copies limited edition* "Stalker" is Eighth Tower's tribute to the cinematic masterpiece "Stalker" (1979) by Russian director Andrej Tarkowskij. Tarkowskij 's second science fiction film after Solaris, "Stalker" is based on a novel by the Strugackij brothers, Arkadij and Boris, renowned authors of Soviet science fiction. The novel, titled "Roadside Picnic," was released in 1971. Tarkovskij adapted the basic literary work, written in the form of dispatches and intelligence reports, inspired by the Tunguska event of 1908—a probable impact in a remote Siberian area of a meteorite or possibly a comet. This collision, still the subject of studies and controversies today, in the 1970s generated a series of pseudoscientific hypotheses akin to a pre-Roswell event, based on the suggestion that the mysterious crashed object was an extraterrestrial spacecraft. 

The Zone is primarily the interior of a rural territory that has been disrupted by an unspecified event, perhaps the fall of a meteorite or the passage of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Within it, strange and mysterious events occur, and many people have disappeared. Above all, there is a rumor that a "Room" capable of fulfilling any desire is located within the Zone. After attempting to study the Zone, the military evacuated the population and restricted access. Scholars need special permits to enter. Only the Stalkers, guides who, for money, accompany anyone willing to try to reach the Room of Desires, challenging the authorities, venture into that territory. The film follows the journey of one of them. The man, a father of a legless daughter, despite his wife's opposition, decides to bring a failed writer in search of inspiration and a professor driven by scientific curiosity into the Zone. Three unnamed characters who seem to represent faith, art, and science.

The world of "Stalker," filmed in Estonia, Russia, and Tajikistan, is a science fiction of inner space, reminiscent of Ballard, a dreamlike space. Leaning light poles, debris, abandoned huts. The film's world is heavily degraded and contaminated by trash, debris, and wreckage. A damp world, flooded, with puddles and rain. A disturbed world of a civilization now in a state of post-industrial decay, continually punctuated by the "dodeskaden," the noise of trains and their vibrations. If we remember the Soviet Union, which would eventually have its forbidden and radiation-contaminated zone around the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, then we can say that Tarkovskij was prophetic in outlining that degraded landscape with the reactors of a nuclear power plant in the background.
Everyone will form a different idea while watching Stalker, but everyone will be left with the impression of having witnessed a work of art, thanks to the emotion that the images and dialogues manage to evoke. After all, art is, above all, emotion.

"The Zone is the Zone, the Zone is life: crossing it, a person either breaks or resists. Whether a person will resist depends on their sense of their own dignity, their ability to distinguish the essential from the transient." - Andrei Tarkovskij