Film Details

The final assault on small-minded, middlebrow cinema by the recently deceased Russian master and rebel Aleksei German (My Friend Ivan Lapshin; Khrustalyov, My Car!) was a 30-year dream project 14 years in the actual making. It’s a visionary, Boschian sci-fi spectacle based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. (Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse were also based on Strugatsky novels.) Hard To Be a God tells of a scientist from Earth who is living on a distant Earth-like planet during its own Dark Ages. Regarded as a god by the human-like natives who wallow in perpetual rain, smoke, mud, muck, waste, and decay, this scientist (one of a group of earthlings sent to observe this feudal “civilization”) is forbidden to intervene in the planet’s intellectual and technological development. But as he witnesses the best minds of this barbaric world being stifled and silenced, he finds it difficult to remain neutral. “If Hard To Be a God isn’t the filthiest, most fetid-looking movie ever made, it’s certainly in the top three.” -Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. “A final opus that is hard to shake.” –The NY Times.