The Earth scientists are ordered not to interfere and to conceal their identities; but one of them, Rumata, wishes to stop the senseless murders of brilliant minds and is forced at last to pick a side.

Disguised as a Noble Don named Rumata of Estor, he has become identified among some of the townspeople as the son of Goran (a local pagan god).

He is tasked with saving the intellectuals of this society - bookworms and sages - who are constantly persecuted by the so-called Gray troops under the leadership of Don Reba, who through usurpation and oppression has become the all-powerful ruler.

From Muga, his head slave, Rumata learns of a certain tobacco-grower from Tobacco Street who is supposedly one of the "clever" inhabitants of Arkanar.

Reba informs him that he has become the Master of the Order, a militant religious sect from the other end of the country, and tries to find out if Rumata really is a god or not.

In the morning, Rumata goes to the torture chambers of the Tower of Joy and rescues Budakh and Baron Pampa, who also happened to end up there.

Afterward, Rumata talks with Budakh, trying to figure out how the scientist would advise a god to rectify the state of affairs in the world of Arkanar.

Defeated and tired, Rumata meets Arata the Hunchback, a feared revolutionary figure, who tries to persuade him to lead a slave uprising with his Earth technology.

Right then, soldiers of the Order burst into Rumata's house in search of heretics, guided by a certain crippled monk, by whose description it is easy to guess that it is Arata.

Furious at the murder of Ari, Rumata declares to their leader, a former university student named Arima, that he will kill them all, and soon makes good on his threat.

From the conversation among the Earthmen, it becomes clear that Ari died from an arrow shot by Arata with the aim of setting Rumata off on the monks of the Order, but also being killed himself.

Filming began in the autumn of 2000 in the Czech Republic and continued off-and-on for a period of several years, ending in August 2006 at the Lenfilm studios in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

The site's consensus reads: "A sci-fi epic with palpable connections to the present, Hard to Be a God caps director Aleksei German's brilliant filmography with a final masterpiece".

[10] Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian newspaper gave it five out of five, calling it: "awe-inspiring in its own monumentally mad way" and "beautiful, brilliant and bizarre".

Club likened it to Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, naming German as "probably the most important Russian filmmaker to remain more or less completely unknown in the United States."

He praised the "grotesque and deranged" medieval sci-fi film as "first and foremost a vision of human misery, brutality, and ignorance.