Repentance (1987)

Filmed in the Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1984, this film was not permitted release until 1987. A satire and  semi-allegorical critique of Stalinism, making this movie was a risky move at the time, but Gorbachev's Glasnost feed a new sense of openness that allowed the Soviet people the freedom to look critically at their past.

"Repentance is set in a small Georgian town. The film starts with the scene of a woman preparing cakes. A man in a chair is reading from a newspaper that the town's mayor, Varlam Aravidze (Avtandil Makharadze) has died. One day after the funeral the corpse of the mayor turns up in the garden of his son's house. The corpse is reburied, only to reappear again in the garden. A woman, Ketevan Barateli (Zeinab Botsvadze), is eventually arrested and accused of digging up the corpse. She defends herself and states that Varlam does not deserve to be buried as he was responsible for a Stalin-like regime of terror responsible for the disappearance of her parents and her friends. She is put on trial and gives her testimony, with the story of Varlam's regime being told in flashbacks.

During the trial, Varlam's son Abel (Avtandil Makharadze) denies any wrongdoings by his father and his lawyer tries to get Ketevan declared insane. Varlam's grandson Tornike (Merab Ninidze) is shocked by the revelations about the crimes of his grandfather. He ultimately commits suicide. Abel himself then throws Varlam's corpse off a cliff on the outskirts of the town.

At the end the film returns to the scene of the woman preparing a cake. An old woman is asking her at the window whether this is the road that leads to the temple. The woman replies that the road is Varlam street and will not lead to the temple. The old woman replies: "What good is a road if it doesn't lead to a temple?"-from the films Wikipedia entry.

The society depicted in the film didn't seem particularly communistic to me, it was a Totalitarian state for sure and the mayor Varlam actually looks like a cross between Hitler and Mussolini. But the film is best understood as an allegory of Stalinism, though the parts about the Stalin figure were to me not nearly as interesting as the parts about his legacy. This movie was made in Georgia, Stalin's birthplace, which serves to stress the psychic importance of the story for both the characters and the cast. This is a movie about a people dealing with, or refusing to deal with, the legacy of an evil former ruler. I thought the dichotomy of Varlam's son's refusal to acknowledge his fathers crimes, and Varlam's grandson's true interest in determining if the charges were true or not, and his horror when he determines they were true, probably spoke a lot about a generational divide and how Stalin was viewed by the Soviet and more specifically Georgian people. This film won the Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Film Festival in 1987, I don't know qualitatively if the film would have been up to that honor if not for the fact that is was the first Soviet film to be openly critical of the Soviet past and to get a wide release. I did find it surprising effecting however. ***