https://vo.rs/tags/hard-to-be-a-god/Latest from the Hard to Be a God desk at vo.rs.Hugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Sat, 22 Mar 2025 12:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/screen/hard-to-be-a-god-germans-medieval-mud-and-the-end-of-the-world/<p>Aleksei German&rsquo;s <em>Hard to Be a God</em> (2013) is the most physically overwhelming film I have ever sat through, and I do not say that lightly. For nearly three hours you are dragged through the streets of a planet called Arkanar, a world stuck forever in a Middle Ages that never produced a Renaissance, and the film&rsquo;s project is to make you feel that filth in your teeth. Mud, pus, spit, snot, blood, offal, rain and rot fill every frame. Faces loom into the lens and back away. Hands reach out and smear the camera. By the twenty-minute mark you have stopped watching a film and started enduring a place. German spent something like fifteen years making it and died in November 2013 before the final mix was complete; his wife and co-writer Svetlana Karmalita and his son Aleksei German Jr. finished it. It is a deathbed film, and it feels like one.</p>Sat, 22 Mar 2025 12:00:00 +0000