Eldar Shengelaia

Of all the figureheads of post-war Georgian cinema — Tengiz Abuladze, Otar Iosseliani, his own brother Giorgi — Eldar Shengelaia’s is the name most readily and explicitly associated with the struggle for national independence. Abuladze et al are important points of reference for Georgian cultural identity; Shengelaia on the other hand was an active political campaigner. Indeed, after the success of his 1983 satire Blue Mountains, he withdrew from filmmaking for a decade to dedicate himself to a political career as remarkable as his artistic one: he was twice elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian SSR; sat on the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR; was a member of the so-called “Sobchak commission” that investigated a Soviet military crackdown on pro-independence protesters in Tbilisi; helped to found the People’s Front of Georgia; and was a signatory to the nation’s eventual Act of Independence in 1991.Read More »

Мачеха Саманишвили / სამანიშვილის დედინაცვალი

Impoverished old nobleman Bekina insists on marrying a wife, but his son Platon does not want to have sharer in father’s inheritance. Platon finds two times widowed and childless bride for Bekina, but a fate makes fun of him.Read More »

Blue Mountains (1983) ends with the implosion of the aspiring novelist’s publishing house. Clearly a symbol of Soviet bureaucracy and its capacity for ultimate self-destruction, this moment is a dazzling and wickedly humorous indication of Georgia’s deep seated disillusionment with the USSR.Read More »

It was always likely that Eldar Shengelaia would end up in film. His father Nikoloz was one of the early pioneers of Georgian cinema, his mother Nato an acclaimed actor. Younger brother Giorgi was an accomplished director in his own right, noted for his 1969 biopic on the Georgian primitivist artist Pirosmani. Both Shengelaia brothers won admission to the VGIK film school in Moscow, the USSR’s most prestigious, graduating a few years apart, and Eldar’s first directorial efforts were produced while working at Mosfilm in the late fifties – The Legend of the Frozen Heart (1957) and A Snowy Tale (1959).Read More »

There’s a distinct madness to Georgian auteur Eldar Shengalaia’s method when it comes to blending political satire and humour. He deploys madcap comedy with ease to both disguise and expose the nuanced complexities of individual and societal living during the Soviet era. The 1973 surrealistic satire Eccentrics is Shengalaia’s second feature-length comedy, in which he rekindles the thematic pneuma of his earlier diploma films such as Legend of the Frozen Heart and Fairy Tale in Snow (1958-60) by juxtaposing fantasy and reality in a fable-like love story, described variously by critics as “poetic”, “grand and eternal”, “a parable of grotesque realism” and “vaudeville-like.”Read More »