Georgii Daneliia: Mimino (1977)
Starring Vakhtang Kikabidze, Frunzik Mkrtchyan, Evgenii Leonov
By 1977 the regime had been fully installed: Aliev in Baku since 1969, Shevardnadze in Tbilisi since 1972, both prosecuting the shadow economy and rebuilding republican cadre rosters. Mimino is the soft public face of that consolidation. A Georgian helicopter pilot and an Armenian truck driver meet in a Moscow hotel and become improbable friends across the long historical rivalry between their peoples. The restaurant dance-off pairs them with German tourists watching from a nearby table; viewed from outside they are interchangeable Soviet southerners, viewed from inside they are proudly distinct. Georgiy Daneliya delivered the friendship-of-peoples register the new Caucasian leadership wanted exported to Moscow, and the team duly took the USSR State Prize in 1978.
Mimino. Directed by Georgii Daneliya. Starring Vakhtang Kikabidze and Frunzik Mkrtchyan. Screenplay by Rezo Gabriadze, Viktoriia Tokareva, and Georgii Daneliia. Cinematography by Anatolii Petritskii. Music by Giia Kancheli. Mosfilm, 1977.