Crossing [2024]

 Swedish-Georgian filmmaker Levan Akin’s fourth feature Crossing began with the seemingly curious information that both Georgian and Turkish languages have gender-neutral grammars; the implication of that became eminently clear over the course of the film as we realize that both countries – like so many others around the world – are steeped in intense gender prejudices, heteronormative attitudes and acute transphobia. This tender and understated film begins in Batumi, the Georgian port city located on the Black Sea, but then quickly moves over to the vibrant melting pot of Istanbul that, despite the right-wing nationalism, religious conservatism and populist rhetoric of the current Turkish government, continues to harbour a throbbing immigrant culture and underground LGBTQ+ scene. The loosely structured narrative revolves around three characters – Lia (Mzia Arabuli), a retired Georgian schoolteacher and middle-aged woman who decides to visit Istanbul in search of her lost trans niece Tekla, in keeping with a promise made to her dead sister and possibly to make amends to her past intolerance; Achi (Lucas Kankava), an opportunistic but essentially goofy, penurious and harmless teenaged guy who coaxes Lia into taking him along, as he wants to escape his brother’s dreary home; and Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a vivacious trans woman and activist lawyer in emphatic solidarity with trans sex workers, who lives a proudly liberated life despite the daily harassments and bigotry that she encounters. The evolving relationship between the trio – debutante Dumanli’s performance being the standout of the lot – was portrayed with empathy for those living subaltern existences on the margins, restrained emotions which cut loose on occasions but stopped short of sentimentality, and enchanting depictions of the bustling local sights and sounds without ever going touristy.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Levan Akin

Genre: Drama/Road Movie

Language: Georgian/Turkish/English

Country: Georgia

April [2024]

 Déa Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April, like her shattering debut film Beginning, was an austere, minimalist, brooding, intensely intimate and formally rigorous work. Operating in the intersection of sparse and desolate realism, scorching social commentaries and undercurrents, and elemental body horror, the film was foremost – like its predecessor – a radical exercise in feminism and a searing investigation into small-town bigotry. Women’s mind, body and agency were evoked as political and personal battlegrounds through its protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an ob-gyn who complements her work in conventional hospitals delivering children with performing secret abortions and surreptitiously providing birth control procedures in intensely religious, conservative and patriarchal village communities. Her acutely isolated life – she fills up her spare time by either being lost in her ravaged interiority or dangerously picking up strange men while taking lonely long drives or engaging in emotionally vacant on-off physical encounters with a kindly ex-boyfriend (Kakha Kintsurashvili) who’s also a respected colleague at the hospital where she works – is punctuated when a baby dies upon a natural delivery performed by her. The grief-stricken father, associating the tragic occurrence with her rumoured work as an abortionist, accuses her of wilful murder, leading to growing scrutiny on the hospital and in turn on Nina’s professional ethics and morality. Sukhitashvili gave a spellbinding turn in portraying her solitary, troubled and defiant character’s emotional struggles and existential crises. The film comprised of a string of viscerally unsettling sequences – including a “live” birth like Márta Mészáros’ Nine Months and a clandestine abortion like Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3, Weeks and 2 Days – shot with gripping exactitude in bravura long takes, while its “slow cinema” aesthetics were accompanied by disquieting imagery and nightmarish atmosphere.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Social Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia

Taming the Garden [2021]

 In his dry and disturbing documentary Safari, Ulrich Seidl had portrayed “trophy hunting”, wherein wealthy tourists kill exotic animals in the African jungles for fun and souvenirs. In Taming the Garden – whose wry and deadpan tableaux, incidentally, reminded me of Seidl’s aesthetic palette – we’re presented with “trophy trees”. Salomé Jashi’s spare, reflective and quietly caustic documentary elucidated the fact that human folly, entitlement and megalomania truly know no bounds, and that the super-rich can desire even the most ludicrous possessions simply because they can have it. Georgian billionaire and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili has one such hobby that nearly beats everything in its staggering absurdity; he gets specialized teams – at enormous cost and extraordinary inconvenience – to uproot massive, magnificent and ancient trees from both private lands and public spaces, and relocate them across great distances – over land and sea – in order to plant them in his personal, artificially constructed and meticulously manicured garden. Jashi covered the process approximately chronologically, albeit captured over unspecified durations and different locations – complex extractions of the majestic giants, oftentimes at night-time to possibly avert protests; equally complicated transportations using trailers and barges, with ethereally shot vistas of the trees gliding over the Black Sea being the ones that stuck most to my mind; and finally ending with a peek into Ivanishvili’s faux park, even if its owner is never seen. These were accompanied with contrasting responses of poor villagers to this anomalous act – while they accepted the money offered for their trees and acknowledged the roads constructed in their villages to enable logistics, they also expressed a wide array of emotions – from amusement and bewilderment to dismay and outrage – at this Faustian transaction.

Director: Salome Jashi

Genre: Documentary

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [2021]

 Alexandre Koberidze’s sophomore feature was a quirky, playful and charming ode to youth, flights of imagination, football, cinema and the ancient Georgian city of Kutaisi. It effortlessly operated in the intersection between endearing romance, magic realism and city symphony, through freewheeling infusion of humour, fantasy and whimsy. At the heart of this lilting film is a wistful, oddball romance between two soft-spoken loners. Medical student Lisa (Ani Karseladze) and football player Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze) bump into each other twice over the course of a day, upon which they agree to fix a date as they start experiencing the soft pangs of first love. However, in a curious twist of fate, they wake up the next day looking completely different (now played by Oliko Barbakadze and Giorgi Bochorishvili) and shorn of their vocational skills. And hence, while their plans go for a toss, in an ironic development they end up getting employed by an affable, middle-aged café owner who’s spectacularly unsuccessful in increasing his business, though not for lack of trying. As we hope for luck to shine back on these two lost individuals, we’re presented with a series of captivating digressions capturing the myriad idiosyncratic shades of the city – viz. the unique personalities of stray dogs, the tradition of watching football games which is amplified during the World Cup, people’s love for whiling time, a director’s attempt at filming actual couples, and the gentle ebb of life in general. Lovingly shot in saturated colours, set to an eclectic score that alternated between peppy and mournful, laced with deadpan humour, and accompanied by narration by the director himself, this film was imaginative, impish and uplifting, albeit tad frothy at times.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Alexandre Koberidze

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Fantasy

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia

Beginning [2020]

 Déa Kulumbegashvili’s marvelous debut feature Beginning – with its rigorous minimalism, austere aesthetics, languorous pacing, brooding undercurrents, visceral unease, moral quandary, narrative ambiguities, and bleak, troubling exploration of faltering faith – had shades of masters ranging from Bergman and Tarkovsky to Tarr and Haneke; yet, for all its influences, the striking Georgian filmmaker stamped her voice by suffusing the proceedings with ferocious feminist underpinnings. The movie began on electrifying note as a Jehovah’s Witness congregation, at a picturesque pasture outside Tbilisi, faces petrol bomb attacks by religious extremists, while they’re in the middle of a didactic sermon on the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac by its stern leader (Rati Oneli, who also co-wrote the script along with Déa). The protracted burning sequence set the tone, mood and context brilliantly, including the clear subtext that this tightly-knit minority community faces regular persecutions by the Orthodox Christian majority and prejudiced officials. The POV thereafter resolutely shifted to the pastor’s wife Jana (Ia Sukhitashvili), and we see her tremendous emotional, psychological and spiritual struggles, considering her daily battles between religious obedience and increasing disillusionment; and this was juxtaposed not just with the societal bigotry and pedantry surrounding her, but also – perhaps most importantly – the patriarchy and misogyny that she experiences as a woman, wife, mother and daughter. Specific to the latter, her life is bound to her boorish husband, her young son preparing for baptism, a man who starts sexually assaulting her, and her dead father whose uncouth behavior continues to plague both her and her aged mother. The film’s disconcerting themes were complemented by stark visuals and long takes, punctuated by nerve-racking violence, and held together by Sukhitashvili’s terrific central turn.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Religious Drama

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia