Mimino (1977) on Netflix
Valentin Mizandari, called Mimino, flies helicopters between villages and longs to pilot international airliners. In Moscow he shares a hotel room with Rubik, an Armenian truck driver.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb8.0/107,952 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Valentin Mizandari, nicknamed Mimino, works as a bush pilot in Telavi, Georgia, carrying passengers between small villages by helicopter. After meeting Valera, a former flight academy classmate who now flies a Tu-144 in Tbilisi, and Valera's stewardess colleague Larisa, Mimino compares his own modest work with an airline career and asks to move up to larger aircraft. He leaves his family for refresher courses in Moscow. His grandfather warns him that he must never kill a certain man. In Moscow he is given a place in an exclusive hotel and shares a room with Ruben Khachikyan, called Rubik, a truck driver from Dilijan whom the hotel confused with an endocrinologist of the same surname. The two become friends.
Cast
- Ruslan Mikaberidzeas Mimino's boss
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mimino (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film was censored, but director Georgiy Daneliya saved the "Telavi/Tel Aviv" phone call scene despite Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration to Israel. He was reportedly so disgusted by the cuts that he buried a copy of the "sanitized" version in his yard.
- The scene of a cow hanging from a helicopter was shot in two stages: a papier-mache dummy of a cow for the distant shots and a live cow lifted by a crane for the close-ups. The cow hung low enough to be safe but high enough to use the blue sky as a backdrop.
- Cinematographer Anatoliy Petritskiy was surprised by director Georgiy Daneliya's wish to shoot in the mountainous Tusheti region, reachable only by helicopter. He called the conditions "medieval", and said the village of Omalo had no electricity and "basically lived without light".
- The film's later scenes were meant to be shot in America, but "purely budgetary reasons" kept the cast and crew from filming there, so they shot in West Berlin instead and the script was revised.
- To save money, the crew stayed in East Berlin and had to cross the border every day into the American zone to film at Tegel Airport.
- While filming in the village of Darklo, the crew lived in quarters that were unlocked and shared with a few shepherds who had stayed for the winter, sleeping on "sleep-benches" and eating canned preserves, which they shared with the hungry shepherds.
