User Reviews

The moral of the film is education. If a child hears from childhood "You are a prince, and he is a slave," his outlook allows him to ignore the common sense. All people are equal. Nationality, title, religion, nothing makes one person better than another. With our lives, our actions, each of us makes this world better or worse. Dzhambulat acted as he was allowed by his education. The upbringing that his father gave him, who accepted death, did not want to put up with the will of his daughter. Sometimes, without giving importance to small things, in our opinion, our actions are destructive, not at the moment, perhaps not with us, but destruction will occur. So the blind, egoistic upbringing, declared at the very beginning of the film, led to the destruction of the family, honor, reason, and the fate in the end.

It's a wonderful story based on a novel of an Osetian writer, Kosta Khetagurov. Very few people would have any access to this movie, so I'll just leave it at that well-deserved praise and would like to wish you all happy hunting, it's worth it, especially if you would like to be immersed in the Caucasus of the old legendary days. Tip to find - the movie exists in Russian, and has been released in Russia on DVD.

To digress a bit - not only this movie hard to find on the shelves, the IMDb put all Soviet-made Georgian movie titles in original Georgian, although it has almost never been the case, unless it was such a small release that was intended for internal viewing in Georgia only. So now, The director Semyon Dolidze gets a proper Georgian name. This movie title always was Fatima, not Patima. It's all fine, but confusing. These were Soviet movies, mostly done in Russian, with the Russian titles and so on. After 1991 it's obviously a different story, however, anything before, why? This was one country, nothing will change that and these movies will exist in Russian. Continuing this logic, why not translate all Soviet-made Uzbekfilm titles into Uzbek, or, for example, work of Dovzhenko studios into Ukrainian. Yet it has not been done, thank god someone here had a few brain cells left.

Another movie that goes well together with this one is by Nikolai Sanishvili (Nikoloz Sanishvili at IMDb) Chermen (Chermeni (1970)). It's another historical drama of the 17th century Osetia.

Stories live long time in that part of the world, memories too. The modern Russian government should keep that in mind when they roll their tanks through these mountains.