The USSR threatened Tengiz Abuladze with the gulag; then the Soviet system handed his film the Grand Prix at Cannes. Made in secret through a loophole in Georgian television, Repentance was the first Soviet film to confront the legacy of Stalin's purges; a grotesque, phantasmagoric parable about a dictator whose corpse will not stay buried. We explore how a banned film, spread across Tbilisi on bootleg cassettes by the very KGB that sought to destroy it, became one of the artistic engines of perestroika, and a reckoning the former Soviet Union has still never truly faced.

This exclusive video essay is based on the writings of Nana Janelidze available now on the Klassiki Journal.

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