Brigands: Chapter VII/Chico [2 Discs] [DVD]

This two-film box set brings the viewer a pair of little-seen provocative features from Eastern Europe, produced within a 5-year span of one another. It begins with Georgian director Otar Iosseliani's 1996 Brigands: Chapter VII - a biting, potent satire that presents various historical episodes of sex and shocking violence, including a contemporary segment where rooftop snipers open fire on passersby; a medieval segment where a king puts his wife in a chastity belt, only to have her turn the tables on him; an episode set in the Communist era of the Soviet bloc where a son must follow his father around and watch the man commit atrocities, and much more. Iosseliani frames all of this action with the story of a group of conservative, stuffed-shirt Georgian film censors who must watch these events unfurl on film, and naturally feel shocked out of their minds. The second film in the set, a German-Hungarian-Chilean-Croatian co-production entitled Chico (2001), emerged from the hand of Ibolya Fekete. It follows the complex evolution of a Bolivian Communist into a Croatia-based resistance fighter active during the early 1990s.