“Art is Alive, Independent and Political”: Georgian cinema in Kutaisi and Tallinn Carmen Gray January 2025 Festival Reports Issue 112 In Georgian filmmaker Nutsa Tsikaridze’s Mtskhunvare Mze (Burning Sun), some kids stumble across a dead body beside a river on a hot summer’s day. At first they think he might just be kidding around, or passed out drunk; but when he is unresponsive to their proddings, the shock of death’s arrival shifts the mood of this sun-kissed realm into something more ominous. The parable of innocence lost and the uncanny recognition of mortality was the winner of this year’s Kutaisi International Short Film Festival, held in October. It was a choice that chimed with the anxiety about the future gnawing under the surface of the event’s warm hospitality. Georgia’s new generation, raised on the hope that the dark ‘90s years of civil war and hardship that followed its break from the Soviet Union were behind it, has been grappling to psychologically process an ongoing wave of violent repression of dissent under a regime that has swung sharply back toward authoritarianism and Russia’s orbit. Kutaisi, an ancient city that is Georgia’s third-largest, and is split by a river with a famed white bridge between its sprawling wooden houses, feels mellower on balmy evenings than chaotic Tbilisi. But its ample charms didn’t entirely distract from the reality that the small Caucasus nation was in a deep political crisis, just two weeks away from a knife-edge general election — nor did the festival seek to ignore it. “Georgian Cinema Is Under Threat” Kutaisi’s team has vocally aligned itself with the protest movement of industry professionals Georgian Cinema is Under Threat, which formed in the summer of 2023 to boycott the Georgian National Film Center amid the Ministry of Culture’s replacement of critical voices with regime loyalists. This year’s fourth edition of the festival almost didn’t go ahead after a pull-out of promised local government funding a mere fortnight before opening night, blindsiding organisers and sparking accusations of punitive sabotage. Help to save the event came through a public donations appeal, as Kutaisi remodelled itself as a “people’s festival,” with an ethos of grassroots solidarity. The crisis infused it with the kind of devotion to cinema felt most keenly when it is at its most imperilled. “Art is alive, independent and political” is the catchphrase of the protest movement. Tsikaridze, after expressing commitment to its aims, dedicated her Best Film award (named the Golden Dinosaur, a nod to the region’s significant archaeological find of prehistoric footprints) to the residents of the village of Shukruti. They had been on hunger strike outside Georgia’s parliament in Tbilisi, some with their mouths sewn shut, protesting the environmental decimation of their homes by a manganese mining company. A feature-length documentary is currently being made on the movement, Wave, directed by Mariam Chachia, who was at the festival with a new short in competition, In C – Tbilisi. Her previous international award-winner Jadosnuri Mta (Magic Mountain, 2023) was publicly criticised by the Minister of Culture — a familiar state of affairs for outspoken Georgian filmmakers at the top of their game on the world stage but condemned by officials at home. The number of new Georgian films included in the international program at Kutaisi, which offers a chance for the public to access, free of charge, the kind of bold, challenging cinema that is ignored on the Film Center’s official pages, was impressive. It Will Be Better Before “We are always at zero — we never remember anything. We just are,” is a line from Keto Kipiani’s haunting, poetic Tsarulshi Uket Ikneba (It Will Be Better Before), another Georgian stand-out in the competition, which has had a successful festival run since premiering at Visions du Reel in Switzerland. Reminiscence is at its heart, and is inseparable from a sense of loss and fragility. The Abustami Astrophysical Observatory is a site of fond return for the narrator. Its books have been abandoned in dust and the clock has stopped, and unwieldy machinery rests under a huge dome in a rain-streaked forest where it was once used to glean hints of the past from the stars. She revisits material collected on a trip there via rusty cable car five years prior to make a film with a new friend from abroad (she shot images; he recorded sounds). An undefined romantic charge of potential closeness that dwindled away underpins reflections of conversations feeling out each others’ philosophies. Speaking French, he naively romanticises futility; in Georgian, she stubbornly sees promise in impossibility. The title, with its mixed tenses that collapse time, conveys the confused desperation of a future torn from one’s control — but a bold, reckless belief in the imagination’s capacity to transform the pains of history and fully inhabit a present that must not slip through one’s fingers. This is a personal story about hanging onto glimmers of meaning but also, implicitly and inevitably, a national one. Anti-LGBTQ+ Censorship A side-program celebrated Pedro Almodóvar at his least commercial and most irreverently risqué through several early works: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del monton (Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom, 1980), Matador (1986), and La flor de mi secreto (Flower of My Secret, 1995). Almodóvar collaborator and star, actress Marisa Paredes, was in attendance, bringing an in-person touch of diva theatricality to Kutaisi. The focus was inspired and pointed, coming on the heels of new legislation introduced by the ruling Georgian Dream party, “On Family Values and the Protection of Minors,” and its censorship clauses designed to curb so-called LGBTQ+ “propaganda” and prohibit the “promotion” of Queer lives. The arrival of Paredes to town generated a lot of buzz. The Georgian Spanish-language interpreter I found myself seated beside during a meal recalled having his mind blown by encountering Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999), which Paredes stars in, years ago, through a television series hosted by legendary Georgian film connoisseur Gogi Gvakharia. Gvakharia was in Kutaisi too, and delivered a packed-out lecture about the history of censorship in Georgia, and its renewed threat. Holy Electricity The new anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, which came into force on 2 December, is far from an abstract risk when considering many recent Georgian successes, like Tato Kotetishvili’s Locarno-awarded feature debut Holy Electricity, which had its national premiere at Kutaisi. Awarded at Locarno amid a highly successful festival run abroad, it is a dry-humoured and freewheeling, episodic vision of life amid the junkyards and eccentric decor of Tbilisi’s margins. Embracing non-conventional modes of existence and a DIY ethos of inventive self-determination, its portrait of Tbilisi is nothing less than a love letter to the creative resilience and life force of a beaten-down populace still able to dream. Cast from non-professionals, it sees Gonga (Nika Gongadze), a long-haired music freak in a Misfits T-shirt, team up with a trans man, junk dealer Bart (Nikolo Ghviniashvili, whose real-life tribulations with mismatched identity documents were echoed in the storyline), for a door-to-door start-up enterprise selling neon crucifixes. True to the Georgian principle of kin sticking close together, if you encounter one Georgian filmmaker, it often leads you to others from the same family. The uncle of the director of Holy Electricity, also named Tato Kotetishvili, was honoured with a retrospective focus. His wildly absurdist shorts, including Rose, Violet & Lily (1990) and To Be Or Not to Be (1992), are shot through with black-humoured imaginings and surrealistic theatricality, and share a similar philosophical universe to Holy Electricity, in their obvious love for the sheer strangeness of humanity and the poetic moments it gives rise to. The work of the two generations shares a heartbeat, too, in the form of Dutch filmmaker Ineke Smits, the elder Tato’s longtime partner and creative collaborator, and a co-producer on Holy Electricity, who was present for a Q&A. She completed the poignant, hour-long documentary Nostalgia (1998), after Tato died suddenly in The Netherlands at the age of 38 immediately after his first trip back to Georgia in a decade to shoot it. Her astute sensitivity to the complexity of emotions seared into the footage is obvious in this beautifully edited record of painful, disorienting return. Kotetishvili envisaged Nostalgia as a film about his city and youth — the Tbilisi of a time that stood in his memory on the other side of civil war, severed friendships and dead relatives. He is determined to recreate the wedding reception from his first marriage with all of its attendees, which happened on the verge of Georgia’s independence, as the nation broke with the Soviet Union and initial euphoria spiralled into the pervasive insecurity and neighbourhood violence of a naked power struggle between rival factions. Grainy home video footage from 1988 shows the original wedding as a wild whirl: the groom and his Australian bride roaring through the streets in a horse-pulled cart, before the raucous, drunken party. Those were pre-internet times, when East and West seemed more clearly delineated and the thrill of exoticism more salient. But for Tato, it seems, he sought through the recreation an identity left in ruins of a city transformed beyond recognition. In conversation, his father speaks with heartbreak of an aggressive sectarianism that took root between citizens straight after independence. It’s the film’s most striking and devastating moment — because he might just as well have been talking about today’s vicious polarisation. Obstructed at Home, Beloved Abroad Blueberry Dreams Kutaisi pulled off a roaring success, but Georgian Dream’s return to power amid widespread allegations of election rigging leaves a question mark hovering over the festival’s survival, in a chilling cultural climate that has seen even the capital’s flagship Tbilisi International Film Festival denied state support. The Georgian Film Institute, an independent body which launched to provide some of the structural support critical voices were lacking, also faces an uncertain future under the government’s crackdown on non-governmental organisations, but it is building a network of sympathetic collaborators abroad. In November, it showed a program of recent films by Georgian filmmakers fighting for independent expression, in co-operation with the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia. Among them was Holy Electricity, and Elene Mikaberidze’s Lurji Mostri (Blueberry Dreams), a sensitively humane and wry-humoured documentary that also screened in Kutaisi. It invites us into the life of a family on Georgia’s border with Abkhazia over nearly two years as they set up a blueberry farm, despite economic precarity and unease over Russia’s close proximity. Legendary Georgian director Lana Gogoberidze, still making films and travelling with them at 96 years of age, accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award in Tallinn, and her latest documentary Deda-Shvili an ghame ar aris arasodes bolomde bneli (Mother and Daughter, Or the Night Is Never Complete) also screened as part of the program. The film traces the early career and imprisonment in Siberia under Stalin of her mother Nutsa, Georgia’s first woman film director, whose husband Levan was shot in the Great Purge, and of Lana’s own attempt to creatively process through the language of cinema their shared life defined by political oppression, family rupture and absence. Nutsa’s silent films Buba (1930) and Uzhmuri (1934) were banned and considered lost until Lana, scouring archives in Russia, succeeded in rediscovering them in 2018. Scenes from them are woven into Mother and Daughter, as well as excerpts from her own films, including Ramdenime interviu pirad sakitkhebze (Some Interviews On Personal Matters (1978), which is about a mother and journalist who interviews women about their lives in ‘70s Tbilisi and is often referred to as one of the first feminist films of Soviet cinema. Reflections on pressure to conform and the solidarity of artistic community extend to reminiscences of the circle of poets and painters the family spent long evenings with — many of whom became the era’s casualties. More than anything, Gogoberidze refutes the historical erasure attempted by the regime, and as a warning about history’s doomed cyclicality, the work is painfully timely. The world premiere of Air Blue Silk, Irine Jordania’s debut feature, opened Tallinn’s program. A huge love for Tbilisi and its inhabitants breathes life into the film, just as it is with Holy Electricity, which she co-wrote with Tsikaridze and Kotetishvili. But Air Blue Silk is a more inwardly thoughtful work, concerned with what it means to know another human, and our place within a wider ecosystem. Eka (Tina Lagidze) has just been watching William Kentridge’s gallery installation “Waiting For the Sibyl,” a kind of flip-book about knowledge and fate, when she learns her aunt has committed suicide abroad. In raw grief, Eka searches beyond surfaces for answers, with a new sensitivity to everyday existence’s fragility and beauty. Reeling from the news, she listens back to her aunt’s chatty voicemails (adding an element of documentary, they were sourced from real voicemails from an emigre relative of the director.) The cheery monologues are about trivial concerns, but the very act of reaching out seems weighted, in hindsight, with what’s been left unspoken. Air Blue Silk The three panes of the apartment’s wooden-framed window are like a triptych between us and the trees outside. This is a film about seeing, but not one in which gazes between people are inclined to meet. We visit another citizen in his solitude, Niko (Lado Oniani), who is developing an AI entity. The mystery of what makes a human exist, in close proximity to the confusion over what makes a person die, colours both with extra poignancy — even though Eka and Lado are unaware of each other. We see people in Tbilisi’s public spaces in long shot as if observed from a distance as they talk, wait at the bus stop, carry protest placards, or dance. Air Blue Silk resists a dramatic narrative, interested rather in the small moments and near-nothings that carry the rhythm and sense of the populace. It’s an unusual film that is either slight or profound, depending how you read it. But, like the other Georgian films discussed here, it is ultimately moving, in its trust that sincere attention will bring meaning to the troubled world within its frame. Kutaisi International Short Film Festival 4 – 9 October 2024 http://kisff.ge/ Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 8 – 24 November 2024 https://poff.ee/en/