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Repentance

Monanieba (Repentance)

1984

Tengiz Abuladze

Avtandil Makharadze, Ya Ninidze, Zeinab Botsvadze, Ketevan Abuladze ...

6.9

193

Drama The day after the fumeral of Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a small Georgian town, his corpse turns up in his son's garden and is secretly reburied. But the corpse keeps returning, and the police eventually capture a local woman accusing her of digging it up. She says that Varlam should never be laid to rest, as when he was alive he was responsible for a Stalin-like reign of terror that led to the disappearance of many of her friends...

	Media	Author	Review
		Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"It’s a macabre but effective kind of political protest against amnesia (...) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		The New York Times	"A sweeping and frank portrayal of the madness that gripped the country during the purges of Josef Stalin."
		Sheila Benson Los Angeles Times	"[Repentance] is lit with bursts of satiric humor, with music, bits of opera and great flights of surreal imagery, which only serve to intensify its growing horror. And it is never less than physically gorgeous."
		Hal Hinson The Washington Post	"Its significance as a social and historical document far outstrips its value as art."
		Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"[It] is probably the best known and almost certainly one of the best Soviet films to have surfaced as a result of glasnost."
		Tony Rayns Time Out	"The result is neither as minatory nor as moving as it thinks it is, despite some arresting surrealist images and the performance of Makharadze as Varlam."

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