Georgia

A thrilling, moving and engrossing drama, boasting powerfully affecting performances from its two young leads, In Bloom is a striking and mesmeric work of independent cinema from one of the world’s most unrepresented countries.

Synopsis:
Tbilisi, 1992: Civil war is raging in the capital of the newly independent Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Amidst the mayhem, two inseparable fourteen-year-old friends, Natia and Eka, find their childhood coming to an end, with dysfunctional families, broken relationships and volatile politics all coming to a head. But the problems of disillusioned love, early marriage and oppressive male dominance will suddenly be thrown into sharp relief when one of the girls is given a gun…Read More »

synopsis

Pastorale won the International Critics’ Prize from the 1982 Berlin Film Festival. Director Otar Ioseliani was something of an outsider in the Soviet system and now lives and works in France. This film, made in 1976, was not released in the West until 1982. Iosseliani’s films show a characteristically Georgian film style; focusing more on character and mood than narrative coherence, they exhibit a characteristically whimsical humor. Pastorale explores what is truly valuable in human relationships, when one cuts away the non-essentials. The story shows what happens when a highly cultured group of musicians from a string quartet spend the summer rehearsing in a small village in the Georgian countryside. In this contemplative, idiosyncratic and somewhat humorous film, they get embroiled in local controversies, and share their gusto for living, loving and drinking with the villagers, to whom they are otherwise incomprehensible, while they rehearse and bicker among themselves.Read More »

Synopsis:
I am Sergei Parajanov! shot a few months after Parajanov’s death. Features archive photographs, his collages, the clips from Sayat-Nova (1968), Ashik Kerib (1988), the making of The Legend of the Surami Fortress (1984) and a few views of the house he lived.Read More »

A timeless Carpathian story – the young Ivan falls in love with the daughter of his father’s killer among the Hutsul people of Ukraine.Read More »

LINK

A lyrical portrait of life in a contemporary Armenian village following the devastation of an earthquake and the fall of communism.

Quote:

Kievski Freski Dir Sergei Paradjanov (Kiev Frescos) 1966. 35mm. 13 mins
Paradjanov assembled this “film collage” from the rushes and tests that remained unscathed after the Soviet authorities halted the production of Kiev Frescos and ordered the negative to be destroyed.

——

When the Soviet authorities were imposing on a multi-national country the artificial conception of a “homogeneous Soviet people”, Paradjanov was defending those nations’ very diversity and uniqueness. Through films and documentaries (both by Paradjanov and others), this programme attempts to trace Paradjanov’s creative journeys through Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia.

Soon after the Soviet authorities stopped the shooting of Kiev Frescos (Kievski Freski) in 1966, Sergei Paradjanov left Dovchenko film studios in Kiev for Armenfilm in Yerevan. There he started work on a feature length homage to Sayat Nova, the pseudonym of the Haroutine Sayadian (Tblissi, 1712 – 1795), an Armenian poet and bard, who wrote in Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani.Read More »