Tengiz Abuladze’s black comic allegory – the first instance of a Soviet filmmaker directly confronting the legacy of Stalin’s purges – caused a sensation when it first aired on Georgian television. Unfolding over two timelines, the film combines absurdist parable with wrenching drama. When the corpse of the recently deceased mayor of a small town is repeatedly disinterred, its citizens must face up to the horrors of their buried past. Abuladze’s poetic film is a powerful act of cinematic testimony, combining religious symbolism with knowing references to the various ghosts of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Tag: USSR
Petro is a modest farmhand living in an impoverished village in some unspecified long-ago era. He wants to marry the lovely Pidorka, but her stern father won’t hear of it. The mischievous demon Basavriuk, offers a deal, enticing Petro into crime for the sake of fortune. Based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Eve of Ivan Kupala” (“St John’s Eve”) and Ukrainian folk tales.
Two eccentrics who have ended up in jail due to their inability to conform build a fantastical flying machine to flee their grey reality. At once a bizarre comedy with bite about two outsiders in some indeterminate place at some indeterminate time, a plea for the power of dream and a concealed critique of the system.
For generations, shepherds from villages high up in the mountains have been travelling with their vast sheep herds, moving them to distant pastures where they spend the long winter. Each of the villagers has a story to tell, intimated through flawless concision, while the film’s effortlessly fluid epic narrative is interwoven with lyrical passages, together creating a timeless cinematic poem about the primary values in life.
A poor working girl goes to a ball and falls in love with the prince. Based on the famous European folk tale as told by Charles Perrault, with Russian verse by Genrikh Sapgir.
This exquisite Soviet animated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale tells the story of a water-dwelling maiden, Rusalochka, who trades her voice for legs after falling in love with a human prince. The story transitions between the black and white human world of Copenhagen, where tourists believe in love but not in mermaids, and the gorgeously vibrant visuals of the underwater mermaid kingdom, accompanied by Aleksandr Lokshin’s haunting music.
Based on the works of the Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela, this influential classic follows a Christian soldier in the Caucasus at the turn of the twentieth century. When he refuses to cut off his enemy’s hand, he is ostracised by his fellow villagers and sent into exile. Wandering through the wilderness in what seems like a dream, he arrives in a Muslim village, where he is sent to the top of a mountain to freeze to death.
The film takes place in the XIX century. In a rich house come to the New Year’s tree children from rich families. A servant girl, similar to Cosette from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, observes their holiday. After the holiday, during the cleaning of the hall, she dances with a broom instead of a partner and sees an abandoned nutcracker – a toy that was cracked with nuts and almost broke. She awakens a pity for the Nutcracker, and he comes to life and tells the main character about his past.