Naum Kleiman explains, “you know with Repentance it’s a very complicated situation. The film was actually started in a Brezhnevian time, under Schevardnadtze. Of course it was at the time of crisis, complete crisis of all ideas of the Revolution. But I know exactly that Abuladze, who did it, wanted to be Eisenstein scholar. He wrote, even as a boy, a letter to Eisenstein asking him if it’s possible to learn cinema under Eisenstein in film school. And he came to Moscow, Eisenstein answered—we have the letter by Eisenstein. And I know that Abuladze knew very well Ivan the Terrible and he used this imagery, sometimes the metaphorical image of Eisenstein to create Repentance. And Repentance itself was a kind of start for our audience to think about the possibility to speak openly, because the film doesn’t have this quality of discovering our history: everybody knew what happened after Khrushchev’s speech, especially, but this was a sign to speak about that openly. For glasnost it was very important.”

See Film footage of Repentance.
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