Passport

Passport is a 1990 tragicomic adventure film directed by Georgiy Daneliya and set in the Soviet Union at the height of the perestroika era. Merab Papashvili, a Georgian who emigrated to Israel years earlier, returns to Soviet soil to visit his twin brother, who stayed behind. Through a mishap, the twins' passports get switched, and Merab finds himself trapped in the country with no document proving he ever entered legally. Unable to establish his identity, he stumbles through an absurd bureaucratic maze, and to make matters worse he ends up wanted by the police on a false accusation of drug trafficking. His desperate attempts to straighten things out and get home pull his beloved and his brother's family into the chaos. The film approaches late-Soviet reality with satire and warm humor. Oleg Yankovsky plays both twin brothers, joined in the cast by Natalya Gundareva, Armen Cigarhanyan, Yevgeny Leonov and Mamuka Kikaleishvili. Produced by Mosfilm as an international co-production, the picture earned Nika awards for best screenplay and best cinematography.