- Stalker is a 1979 Soviet science fiction art film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, with a screenplay written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. It depicts an expedition led by a figure known as the ‘Stalker’ (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) to take his two clients, a melancholic writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) seeking inspiration and a professor (Nikolai Grinko) seeking scientific discovery, to a site known simply as the ‘Zone’, which has a place within it with the supposed ability to fulfill a person’s innermost desires.