The epic adaptation of iconic sci-fi novel by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God is Russian director Alexei German’s last film before his death in 2013.
A group of research scientists has been sent to the planet Arkanar, where a despotic regime rules. The local population is suffering a ban issued on anyone who knows how to read and write. Don Rumata has to find one of these people and rescue him from the hands of the tyrannical ruler, Don Reba. Hard to Be a God is a project that the Russian director Alexei German had been considering since the mid-1960s. In 2000, German began work on the epic project, which took thirteen years of hard work and was completed by Svetlana Karmalita and their son, Alexei A. German.
»It is amazing how we are losing the art of film without even realising it. /.../ Neither Russian nor American contemporary films can reach that level. Film has turned into something for people who are bored to read the book, and that is why the contents of the book are narrated to them by actors. That is why I almost never watch modern movies. /.../ Film is a divine art, which is now overtaken by lazy people with empty eyes which they are covering all the time with their hands.« (Alexei German)
Aleksej German
Born in Leningrad (present-day Sankt Petersburg, Russia) in 1938, Alexei German is considered one of the most important Russian filmmakers. The extraordinary artistic integrity of this filmmaker, equivalent to that of great masters such as Terrence Malick and Stanley Kubrick, and the incursions of Soviet censorship, which regularly barred the release of his films, limited German’s production to six feature-length films. Having worked on Hard to Be a God for thirteen years, German passed away in 2013, aged 74, in his native Sankt Petersburg.