In the summer of 1941, a group of idealistic Tbilisi students graduate. Their hopes for the future are scuppered by impending war. Robbed of their dreams, they are sent to the front line. Their struggle is chronicled with astonishing cinematographic beauty, following them from Georgia to the Berlin Reichstag.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 »
A widowed train engineer begins looking for a wife to help him raise his kids. He proposes to his girl friend, but she is not interested in caring for the children of another woman. Fortunately his persistence pays off and he finds a suitable wife and mother. Unfortunately, father turns out to be a selfish cad and when the old girl friend suddenly shows up again, he leaves his family without a backward glance. The angry wife also decides to leave, but just as she prepares to board the train, she sees the children running after her and decides to stay.
Won awards at the international film festivals in Tashkent, Helsinki, London and Tehran.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 »
A young model returns to the Georgian countryside, where a confrontation with her past offers hope for the future.Read More »
A middle-aged, unemployed heroin-addict, Checkie, loiters on the Tbilisi street outside his son’s school, where he himself was once a promising student. His wife, meanwhile, struggles to pay the tuition and understand her husband’s lack of interest in the family’s survival—even as the bank repossesses their furniture. But when a group of policemen blackmails Checkie into entrapping the son of his wealthy friend, husband and wife are unified by the uncertainty of their deepening moral dilemma, and a series of worsening foul-ups, in Levan Koguashvili’s lightly humorous yet realistic drama about the fate of a generation left behind in Georgia’s post-Soviet era.Read More »
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Fortysomething Sandro still lives at home with his parents. He and his best friend seem to have no luck at finding true love during their misadventures of meeting and date various women.Read More »
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In this portrait of parental sacrifice and the love of a father for his son, former wrestler Kakhi (played by real-life Olympic champion Levan Tediashvili) embarks on a journey from his home in the Republic of Georgia to visit his son Soso (Giorgi Tabidze) in the Russian-speaking neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. There he finds him living in a shabby boarding house populated by a colorful group of fellow Georgian immigrants. Soso is not studying medicine, as Kakhi believed, but is working for a moving company and has accrued a $14,000 gambling debt to a local Russian mob boss. Kakhi sets his mind to helping his hapless son out of his debt, leading to situations as often comic as they are dire. Lensed by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (The Trial of the Chicago 7, Nebraska), Levan Koguashvili’s Brighton 4th won three major awards at the Tribeca Film Festival – Best International Film, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay – and is Georgia’s official submission to the 94th Academy Awards.Read More »