"Hard to Be a God" is a Russian science fiction film directed by Aleksei German. Based on the novel Hard to Be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Work behind the lens started in the 1990s and continued for more than 15 years.
In February 2013, German senior passed away. The director’s friends and family continued work on the film. At the time, according to his son, German junior, besides a few technical details (dubbing) the movie was already “practically done.”
The movie was presented to a mass audience in a final dubbed version in Rome.
German was posthumously awarded the Rome Film Festival’s award — a Golden Capitolina She-Wolf — for his “contribution to cinema.”
"The biggest honor for me will be the award for Alexei Yurevich German’s contribution to cinema. It’s sent with the bitterness of loss, the death of German. He helped us understand what modern cinema is.
We all understood what cinema is through a chronological lens. Through German’s work, we understood what our work’s courage, bravery, and redefinition are each time," says the festival’s artistic director, Mark Mueller.
PlotOn another planet, which goes through its Middle Ages, a group of historians from Earth live pretending to be average people. The main character, known as Don Rumata, is disgusted by cruelties he observes on everyday basis but is prohibited by his superiors from interfering and thus changing the natural course of history of the planet. The only thing the historians have a right to do is to protect and help few individuals who seem to be different from everybody else and can benefit the entire planet through their knowledge and ideas. Rumata has to find one of these people, Budakh, and rescue him from the hands of Don Reba, a grey cardinal ruling for a weak king and later, an insane tyrant.
Umberto Eco writes in his essay: “Perhaps being God is hard, but it’s also hard to be a viewer that approaches this gigantic work. After seeing German’s films, you can rest assured that Tarantino’s films are only a Walt Disney production.”
