Production notes

Ivan's Childhood was Tarkovsky's first feature film, shot two years after his diploma film The Steamroller and the Violin. The film is based on the 1957 short story "Ivan" (Russian: Иван) by Vladimir Bogomolov, which was translated into more than twenty languages. It drew the attention of the screenwriter Mikhail Papava, who changed the story line and made Ivan more of a hero. Papava called his screenplay Second Life (Russian: Вторая жизнь, Vtoraya zhizn). In this screenplay Ivan is not executed, but sent to the Majdanek concentration camp, from where he is freed by the advancing Soviet army. The final scene of this screenplay shows Ivan meeting one of the officers of the army unit in a train compartment. Bogomolov, unsatisfied with this ending, intervened and the screenplay was changed to reflect the source material. Mosfilm gave the screenplay to the young film director Eduard Abalov. Shooting was aborted and the film project was terminated in December 1960, since the first version of the film drew heavy criticism from the arts council, and the quality was deemed unsatisfactory and unusable. In June 1961 the film project was given to Tarkovsky, who had applied for it after being told about Ivan's Childhood by cinematographer Vadim Yusov. Work on the film resumed in the same month. The film was shot for the most part near Kanev at the Dnieper River. Tarkovsky continued his collaboration with cinematographer Vadim Yusov, who was the cameraman in Tarkovsky's diploma film The Steamroller and the Violin. Nikolai Burlyayev had played a role in Andrei Konchalovsky's student film The Boy and the Pigeon. Konchalovsky was a friend and fellow student of Tarkovsky at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), and thus Burlyayev was also cast for the role of Ivan. He had to pass several screen tests, but according to Burlyayev it is unclear whether anyone else auditioned for the role. Burlyayev would later play Boriska in Tarkovsky's second feature, Andrei Rublev.

Nature takes up an important role in Ivan's Childhood. Before the film’s release, the Stalinist viewpoint on war cinema in the 1930s and 40s was that of instrumentalizing nature as a means to serve human agency in context of violence. Ivan's Childhood is produced during the stagnating period of Khrushchev thaw, and as a result instead is considered pioneer in its use of extensive and predominant representation of nature. In the film, nature is omnipresent and is captured both in Ivan’s dreams and in scenes of violence, it’s portrayed as an active witness of human violence, but also as a rebellious force itself entangled in battle, namely as a victim of war. Furthermore, Tarkovsky’s framing of nature in tracking shots was also intended as visual poetry adding a layer of artistic elegance to the film. The way in which he balances poetic representations of nature and violent narratives of war unveils his pursuit of an aesthetic representation of war, and thus also exhibiting his distinguishing cinematographic signature.

Ivan's Childhood was one of Tarkovsky's most commercially successful films, selling 16.7 million tickets in the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky himself was displeased with some aspects of the film; in his book Sculpting in Time, he writes at length about subtle changes to certain scenes that he regrets not implementing.

The film received international acclaim on its release. Ivan's Childhood has an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 27 reviews, and an average rating of 9.10/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Ostensibly an atypical Tarkovsky work (less than 100 minutes!), Ivan's Childhood carries the poetry and passion that would characterize the director from here on". It attracted the attention of many intellectuals, including Ingmar Bergman who said, "My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease." Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an article on the film, defending it against a highly critical article in the Italian newspaper L'Unità written by Alberto Moravia and saying that it was one of the most beautiful films he had ever seen. In a later interview, Tarkovsky (who did not consider the film to be among his best work) admitted to agreeing with Moravia's criticisms at the time, finding Sartre's defense "too philosophical and speculative". Filmmakers Sergei Parajanov and Krzysztof Kieślowski praised the film and cited it as an influence on their work.

Ivan's Childhood received numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1962. The film was also selected as the Soviet entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 36th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.