After Armando Iannucci screened his new film, The Death of Stalin, at the Sundance Film Festival he was approached by a woman crying heavy tears.
It wasn't the reaction the creator of TV shows Veep and the Thick of It was expecting from his historical comedy, but dealing with the last days of a dictatorship was bound to bring up bad memories for some people.
"I asked if she was OK and she said 'they're tears of relief, this is my country'," Iannucci told AAP.
"She was from Zimbabwe and I think this was just the week after Mugabe left office, leaving the army to move in and tell him to leave, like at the end of the film, and she said 'this story, this has just happened in my country and we can now say things in public that we were too scared to say before'."
What Iannucci is discovering since he released the film – based on the time before and after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953 – is that the story repeats both in real life and in popular culture.
"It's ancient this story, it's like from ancient Rome and it's The Godfather and Game Of Thrones, it's all that," he said.
Even in the five months since the movie was first released in the UK, the writer/director says the film's references have evolved along with real-life politics.
"When it came out in the UK people were drawing parallels with Trump. Now people are making the parallel with Putin," he said.
The movie was made before the US election, but there was enough political unrest in the world for Iannucci to find relevance in the movie's story, which was adapted from a French graphic novel of the same name.
"I was kind of interested in that idea of dictatorship because things had been happening around Europe with Berlusconi and Putin, Erdogan in Turkey … there were these very authoritarian figures emerging through democracy, and then wanting to change the constitution so they could have even more power.
"And then nationalist and extremist movements, new parties emerging, it all felt very unstable and uncertain so I suppose it's no surprise that inevitably you end up with someone like Trump as well," he said.
The film, though, manages to find amazing moments of comedy in the power plays and squabbles between Stalin's remaining cabinet members.
"The events we were looking at were so crazy that in many ways the only way you can rationally respond to them is through comedy because they are absurd," he said.
"There's a madness to them and also horror as well."
*The Death Of Stalin opens in Australian cinemas from Thursday, March 29
Australian Associated Press
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