#Andrei Tarkovsky

The film Ciudo/The Miracle (2009), directed by Aleksandr Proșkin from a screenplay by Yuri Arabov, recreates the miracle known as ‘Zoya’s Stiffening’, which took place in 1956 in Kuibyshev, at the height of Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign. This historical epic traces the reactions of various social groups — a journalist, a party propagandist, a priest, Khrushchev himself — to a miracle that defies state-sanctioned scientific atheism, offering a reflection on faith, lies and collective repentance.

The film Repentance (1984) by the Georgian-Soviet director Tengiz Abuladze, banned for three years by the Soviet authorities and released during the Gorbachev era, is the most significant cinematic manifesto against totalitarianism, rejecting dictatorship from the perspective of Christian humanism and demonstrating that any oppressive system amounts to the expulsion of God from individual and collective consciousness.