Real and Surreal in the First Anti-Soviet Film: Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance
Real and Surreal in the First Anti-Soviet Film: Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance

Summary/Abstract: Tengiz Abuladze's (1924-1994) film Repentance (1984) is still regarded as one of the most anti-Soviet films produced within the former Soviet Union.While Soviet censorship was still harsh in the years when the film was made, it was the first, not only in Georgia but in the whole USSR, to openly and critically address the issues of Soviet totalitarianism and the Great Purge.The article suggests viewing the film from multiple angles, recalling the facts and circumstances that affected its production, including political support and/or censorship,fatalities, and artistic difficulties. The article demonstrates how the film director, aiming to reconstruct and reflect on the real history of one of the most brutal periods of the recent past, seeks artistic forms and approaches that will represent reality also through surreal and phantasmagorical scenes. The decision to blend the aesthetic elements of realism and surrealism in the film can be seen as an emphasis on the dual nature of Soviet history: it was real, yet so unbelievably brutal and illogical that it acquired surreal features. This fusion made the story somewhat eclectic but allowed us to see it as timeless, a struggle between good and evil. Repentance was precisely the first cinematic victory in the battle against the‘empire of evil’.

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