Seventy-six-year-old Otar Ioseliani may have long ago turned into a genteel Parisian film director, but his inner Georgian comes out even at the Cannes Film Festival. Interviewed by The New York Times about his new out-of-competition film at Cannes, Chantrapas, the arthouse author put down his cigarette to launch into a Russia-bashing tirade.
“The Russians never behaved in the civilized fashion – never,” Ioseliani said. “Look how the English left India, but the Russians won’t leave. They are, well, something else, the whole lot: Putin, Medvedev, and before, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and Stalin and, the rotter of the lot, Lenin. Before, there was that idiot Czar Nicolas.”
Russians are the neighbors from hell, he summed up. “We don’t hate them, we just hold them in contempt.”
Tired of the Soviet regime’s constant censorship of the films he made in Georgia, Ioseliani immigrated to France in the 1970s to become an acclaimed director of absurdist, cinema-literate films.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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