ABSTRACT
The trajectory of the film Hard to Be a God by Aleksei Gherman represents a rare case in the history of cinema. The film-maker first started to work on it in 1968, but then the script was prohibited and Gherman took it up again only 31 years later; it was completed posthumously in 2013. On the whole, the creation of the film covers 45 years, from the Soviet Stagnation period to the post-Soviet era, and thus traverses radically different socio-political and economic contexts. The story of the making of this unique film helps us understand how politics impacted on the arts, and how some artists sensed similarities between the years from 2000 to 2010 and the Stagnation era.
