April

A young couple live in an empty, run-down flat. The love between them is strong enough to make the water run and the electricity work. Then they begin buying furniture and collecting knick-knacks, and every object that comes into the house pushes them a little further apart. Otar Iosseliani’s first longer film runs almost without dialogue and builds a short, hard joke about what accumulation does to people. Soviet officials banned it under a campaign against abstraction and formalism, while Iosseliani said the ending was read as a parable about the defeat of Bolshevism. It could not be released until 1972. After the ban the director left filmmaking for a time and worked on a fishing boat and at the Rustavi metallurgical plant. The record dates the film 1963; sources give the production as 1961 or 1962.