General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Mimino (Мимино)

Mimino (Мимино; Georgian: მიმინო, "falcon") is a 1977 Soviet comedy-drama directed by Georgiy Daneliya at the Mosfilm studio, starring Vakhtang Kikabidze as Valiko Mizandari, a Georgian helicopter pilot nicknamed Mimino, and Frunzik Mkrtchyan as Ruben Khachikyan, an Armenian truck driver he befriends in Moscow¹. The film follows the pilot from a remote mountain village to a job on international airlines and back home again, and it became one of the most quoted comedies of late Soviet cinema².

Key fact	Detail
Production	Mosfilm, USSR, 1977; directed by Georgiy Daneliya; screenplay by Rezo Gabriadze, Viktoria Tokareva, and Daneliya¹
Title meaning	"Mimino" is Georgian for "falcon," the nickname of pilot Valiko Mizandari¹
Key crew	Cinematographer Anatoliy Petritskiy; composer Gia Kancheli; production designers Boris and Eleonora Nemechek¹
Release	First shown at the 10th Moscow International Film Festival in July 1977; wide Soviet release 27 March 1978³^•⁴
Audience	24.4 million Soviet viewers in the first year of release⁴
Awards	Golden Prize at the 10th Moscow International Film Festival (1977); USSR State Prizes in 1978 for Daneliya, Kikabidze, and Mkrtchyan¹^•⁵
Format	Color feature, 92 minutes, restored in 2014¹

Spoilers

Plot

Valiko Mizandari, called Mimino by his friends, flies a Mi-2 helicopter serving mountain villages in the Georgian SSR, carrying mail, fruit, chickens, sheep, and even cows⁶. Meeting a former classmate at the Tbilisi airport, who flies a supersonic airliner among stewardesses, Mimino decides to change his life and goes to Moscow to apply for retraining as a pilot of large aircraft⁶.

In a Moscow hotel he shares a room with Ruben Khachikyan, an Armenian truck driver whom the staff have mistaken for a professor of endocrinology⁶. The two drift through comic, sad, and at times dramatic situations before Mimino achieves his goal and becomes a pilot on an international airline¹. Once his dream has come true, however, he longs for his native mountains, his old helicopter, and his neighbors, and he returns to his sister and her son and to the daily flights between villages⁷.

Origin and writing

The idea of a film about a pilot had been with Daneliya for years, and the first version, planned under the title "Nothing Special," was about a corn-field aviator who wrote poetry and played the trumpet⁸. The turning point came when the screenwriter Rezo Gabriadze, a Georgian dramatist and founder of the Tbilisi Puppet Theater, reminded Daneliya of a story he had once told: a village pilot who, returning from a flight, chained his helicopter to a tree and locked it so it would not be stolen⁹. Daneliya decided overnight to replace the already approved script, telegraphed Gabriadze to come to Moscow, and the two, joined by the writer Viktoria Tokareva, wrote the new screenplay in about twenty days at the Bolshovo creative house, with a second director collecting finished pages every two days so the crew could keep shooting¹⁰.

The division of labor followed the geography of the story: Gabriadze wrote the Georgian village scenes, Tokareva the romantic line between Valiko and Larisa Ivanovna, and Daneliya the foreign, hotel, and courtroom episodes¹¹. The hero's surname was taken from Valerian Mizandari, a sculptor who had been Gabriadze's teacher⁵.

Cast and filming

The role of Valiko was written for Vakhtang Kikabidze, whom Daneliya had already directed in "Don't Grieve!" and "Quite Lost"; the part of Ruben went to Frunzik Mkrtchyan, and the cast also included Yevgeni Leonov, Yelena Proklova, Vladimir Basov, Archil Gomiashvili, and Leonid Kuravlyov, the last cast almost by accident when Daneliya met him at the studio and asked him to "play an Armenian"¹^•¹². Mkrtchyan improvised many of the film's now-famous lines, and Daneliya himself appeared in a small role as the captain of the crew entering the airport hall¹³^•¹².

Filming under the working title "Nothing Special" took place in Tbilisi, Moscow, and Domodedovo and lasted eight months¹². For the mountain village the crew chose Omalo in Upper Tusheti, reachable only by a rarely flying helicopter, on horseback, or on foot over two or three days⁹. The foreign episodes, originally hoped for in America, were shot with living quarters in the GDR and filming in the Federal Republic of Germany¹². Moscow scenes were shot in thirty-degree frost, with the actors warming themselves at Daneliya's apartment nearby, and after a large fire at the Hotel Rossiya on 25 February 1977 destroyed the set, the heroes' hotel room had to be rebuilt in a Mosfilm pavilion¹²^•¹¹.

Censorship and versions

The film's release history reflects Soviet censorship across several leaderships. Under Brezhnev a scene was cut in which Mkrtchyan and Kikabidze ride an elevator with two look-alike Japanese men who remark to each other, in Japanese with Russian subtitles, "How alike all these Russians are"¹⁴. Later, under Yuri Andropov, the episode of a phone call from Germany that accidentally connects Mimino to Tel Aviv disappeared¹⁴. Before the 1977 Moscow International Film Festival, the cinematography minister Filipp Yermash personally demanded the removal of the Tel Aviv episode, on the grounds that the USSR had no diplomatic relations with Israel and the topic should not appear at an international festival¹⁵. Scenes connected with a village blacksmith were also cut and the ending was reworked⁶.

Reception and awards

At the 10th Moscow International Film Festival in July 1977 the film won the Golden Prize¹. In 1978 it received an award for the best comedy film at the 11th All-Union Film Festival in Yerevan, and Daneliya, Kikabidze, and Mkrtchyan were awarded USSR State Prizes⁵. Recognition also came from an Italian festival in Avellino¹⁶.

The film drew 24.4 million Soviet viewers in its first year, and its dialogue entered everyday speech; the song "Chito-gvrito" ("a little bird") was sung across the country, and lines such as "I want Larisa Ivanovna!" became catchphrases⁴^•². On Kinopoisk the film holds a rating of 8.3 from more than 272,000 votes, ranking 111th in the site's top 250⁶.

Legacy

Critics read the film as a story about a person's bond with the land that raised him. Kikabidze said Daneliya had expressed "the unbreakable connection of a person with the earth on which he grew up, the roots without which he cannot live"³. The friendship between the Georgian pilot and the Armenian driver has made the film a point of shared reference across the South Caucasus, and it remains widely known in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan¹⁷.

The film's afterlife includes monuments: in the summer of 2011 a statue of the heroes Valiko, Rubik, and Ivane was unveiled in Dilijan, Armenia, and in the autumn of the same year a monument to the film was installed in Tbilisi; a 2006 proposal for a Moscow monument on Chistye Prudy was rejected by the city culture commission¹⁶. Mosfilm restored the film in 2014, and it is available with audio description on the Culture.RF portal¹^•⁵.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1970s › Released 1977 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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