Repentance (film)

What is the story?

In a small Georgian town a woman is preparing cakes shaped like churches while a man reads a newspaper: the mayor Varlam Aravidze has died. The morning after the lavish funeral, the corpse is in the garden of his son Abel. It is reburied and comes back. Waiting at the grave, the grandson Tornike shoots and wounds a figure in the dark, who turns out to be the town's finest confectioner, Ketevan Barateli.

In court she explains. When she was eight, Varlam came to power in the town. Her father, the painter Sandro, drew his attention by asking him to remove electrical equipment from the old church. Varlam agrees in a hothouse, and next day members of the delegation are arrested. Sandro is taken on a false denunciation and her mother Nino follows. His friend Mikhail names him in an absurd plot of 2,600 people to dig a tunnel from Bombay to London. Women queue at a small hatch for news, and in one scene they search stacks of logs from Siberia for a name their husband might have carved.

Abel's lawyer tries to have Ketevan declared insane and Abel defends his father. Shaken by the truth, Tornike confronts him and shoots himself with the hunting rifle his grandfather gave him. Abel himself digs up the corpse and throws it off a cliff. The film returns to the cakes. An old woman at the window asks whether this road leads to the church; Ketevan replies that it is Varlam Street and will not. The old woman says: "What good is a road if it doesn't lead to a church?"

How could such a film be made?

It is the third film of Abuladze's trilogy, after The Plea and The Wishing Tree. Abuladze said he got the idea from a story in western Georgia of a man wrongly imprisoned who dug up the prosecutor who sent him there and propped the corpse against a wall. In 1981 he took the script to Eduard Shevardnadze, then first secretary of the Georgian party. After six months Shevardnadze said "1937 came to my house as well" and that a way must be found. Georgian television had two hours Moscow did not review, and for republic-level films a theme and a director's name were enough, so Moscow's script approval could be avoided.

Shevardnadze advised that the more generalised the better. Abuladze did not make Varlam a copy of Stalin. He combined a Hitler moustache, Mussolini's pomp and love of opera and Beria's pince-nez and build, and put guards in medieval armour to blur the period. There is no Georgian surname Aravidze; its root means "nobody".

There were many setbacks. In 1983, 5,000 metres of footage were ruined by the lab. Gega Kobakhidze, who played Tornike, was arrested that November for an attempted hijacking of an airliner to Turkey and sentenced to death, and the scenes were reshot with Merab Ninidze.

Why was it shelved and then released?

When the film was finished in 1984 Konstantin Chernenko was in power, and it was shown once and shelved. In 1985 Gorbachev took office and Shevardnadze joined the Politburo. In spring 1986 he arranged a screening for Gorbachev, whose two grandfathers had both suffered in the repressions, and Gorbachev agreed. Then came Chernobyl. After the 5th Congress of the USSR Union of Cinematographers, Elem Klimov, the union's new first secretary, set up a commission on banned films and went to Alexander Yakovlev, who proposed showing it to selected audiences first and widening from there. He later said: "I understood that the release of the film would be like a signal flare marking a turn in the political course." After elite screenings in October 1986, the first public screening took place in Moscow on 26 January 1987, and it spread nationwide.

According to English sources, the authorities unofficially banned it again in 1988. It was banned in East Germany as well, but when many East Germans watched it on West German ZDF in October 1987, their newspapers ended up running editorials against a film they had officially never shown. At Cannes in 1987 it took the Grand Prix, the FIPRESCI Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize. It is said in film circles that Klimov, on the jury, blocked Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes to help it; this comes from Mikhalkov and from a critic's account.

What really happened?

The names are invented, but Abuladze said the pieces were true. The daughter of the executed Communist Mamia Orakhelashvili worked in a confectionery all her life. A train of logs from Siberia reached Chokhatauri with Georgian inscriptions, and some people are said to have found the names of relatives who were political prisoners. A delegation received and then arrested the next day was Beria's doing. The queue at the hatch recalls Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem, and "ten years without the right to correspond" meant a death sentence. The terror of the 1930s is the film's skeleton, while Stalin himself is never named or shown.