Born in Leningrad in 1938 and dying in Saint Petersburg in 2013, Aleksei German made only a handful of films because of censorship and his perfectionism. Trial on the Road (1971) was banned until 1985, and he went on to make Twenty Days Without War (1976) and My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), a portrait of life in a provincial town in the 1930s. After Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) he spent more than a decade on Hard to Be a God, a dirty, long-take vision of a medieval planet, completed after his death by his son Aleksei German Jr. and released in 2013.
Filmography
- Trial on the Road (1971)
- Twenty Days Without War (1976)
- My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984)
- Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998)
- Hard to Be a God (2013)