Post Description

Sovjet-Unie
Drama
153 minuten

geregisseerd door Tengiz Abuladze
met Avtandil Makharadze, Ya Ninidze en Zejnab Botsvadze

Zodra Varlam, burgemeester van een Georgisch dorp komt te overlijden, besluit Ketevan Baratelli dat het verleden niet begraven mag worden. Ze graaft het lichaam van de met Hitler-snor en Mussolini-bretels getooide Varlam meerdere keren op. Voor deze daden wordt ze in een rechtszaak op het matje geroepen. Tijdens het geding blijkt dat Varlam verantwoordelijk was voor de deportatie en dood van haar vader, de kunstenaar Sandro Baratelli.

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Description
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Repentance (Pokayaniye) features Avtandil Makharadze in a dual role. As Georgian mayor Varlam Aravidze, Makharadze is a strutting, arbitrarily cruel dictator, something of a composite Stalin and Hitler. Visually he very closely resembles Lavrentiy Beriya, Stalin's right hander and one-time KGB chief.

As Abel, the mayor's son, Makharadze finds himself in the middle of an ideological squabble when his father dies. Zeinab Botsvadze, a local woman who had suffered mightily under the mayor's regime, refuses to allow the old man's corpse to be interred. Despite the son's Herculean efforts, Botsvadze continues digging up the late mayor's body, a symbolic gesture to prevent the dead man's villainy from being forgotten.

Repentance was the first Soviet film that openly denounced the horrors of Stalinism, though the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze (known for his poetic and surrealist films) chose to make it allegorical, deliberately using anachronisms and making the leading character look like a combination of Stalin's henchman Lavrenti Beriya, Hitler, and Mussolini. An interesting point -- the last name chosen for the leading character is totally fictional, there is no such name as Aravidze in Georgia. In fact, "aravi" means "nobody" in Georgian. The filmmakers opted for such a name in order not to offend any real person in the Republic of Georgia. Filmed in 1984, Repentance fell victim to Soviet censorship from the moment it left the editing room. When it was finally released in 1987, the film was deservedly garlanded with several awards, including the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize. 


Format: PAL

DVD Size: 7.83 GB -- Exact Untouched Copy

Runtime (main feature): 153 minutes

Type: Color

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1

Sound (main feature): Georgian (original) | Russian (voiceover) |  French (dub)

Subtitles: English | French | Spanish | Italian | Dutch | Japanese | Swedish | German | Portuguese | Hebrew | Arabic | Chinese | Russian


DISC FEATURES:

# Documentaries about Lavrentiy Beria and Veriko Andzhaparidze.
# Filmographies.
# Photo album.


Posted in: a.b.dvd.classics
Thx jimb