The Sacrifice Book
. 'In the opening shot, before Otto meets them, Alexander tells Little Man the legend of Ioann Kolov, pupil of an Orthodox monk named Pamve, who was ordered by his master to climb a mountain every day, to water a dead tree he had planted, until the tree came back to life, which, after three years, it did. It is also worth noting that an idea that appears in Tarkovsky's diaries as early as 1970, which he titled Two Saw the Fox, possibly contains elements of what would become The Witch, and by extension, The Sacrifice.