I refer to this 2014 production (released stateside last year), in which a Central Asian tyrant—his country is unnamed, but there’s a suggestion that it could be a former Soviet republic, and the production was in fact filmed in Georgia, directed by an Iranian—is caught flat-footed by a popular uprising in the aftermath of which the common folk of Fuckedupistan disclose that they don’t love the Dear Leader after all. The early minutes of the drama, in which the dictator is slow to realize that the sudden civil unrest, for all that it’s serious enough for him to send most of his appalling family abroad, is nothing that can’t be quelled by applying a bit of the boot, are particularly effective. Once things go abruptly pear-shaped—his retinue skips out on him and the army, going for the main chance, revolts—President Badguy is obliged to travel incognito, accompanied by MiniMe, his intolerably chatty young grandson (“Don’t call me Your Majesty!”) through some of the grittier districts of his unhappy and resentful land. Now a fugitive with a million-dollar bounty on him, swapping his natty dress uniform for some decidedly shabby mufti, our disguised despot, thinking better, it may be, of having decreed in palmier days that his visage should be plastered in every home and on every street corner in the land, is vouchsafed the opportunity to get up close and personal with some aspects of former regime practices not readily descried from the tonier precincts of the presidential palace. Hilarity doesn’t ensue.

It gets a bit preachy near the end, but I found it well worth the two hours. Might be difficult to find at your local video emporium, though.

cordially,