Discoveries from Georgia World Cinema

Full movie based on TV-series "My Wife's Friends"

Film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov

In the isolated mountainous region of Tusheti in North East Georgia, life has remained largely unchanged since medieval times until last summer, when the Georgian government introduced free wifi access. As a result, the aspirations of young Tushetians are shifting dramatically, caught between nostalgia for the past and yearning for the future - and nowhere is this conflict of desires more pronounced than during Atengenoba, the region’s traditional summer festivities, which also fall within its busiest tourist season.

A dreamy girl’s first love, a boy from her village, leaves her, leaving her unable to bear the reproaches of her family and the shameful life she now lives. In the hope of starting a new life, she ventures to the city, only to find that it too will not spare her. Her futile struggle to establish herself in the city leads to her spiritual and, ultimately, physical destruction.

The main character of the film is a journalist — Liza, a woman in her mid-forties, who, 25 years ago, worked as a war reporter during the Georgian-Abkhazian military conflict (1992-1993), which Russia provoked for the purpose of occupying Abkhazia.

By recreating personal stories though testimony, poetry and archival material, the artist and performers explore deep traumas that no single place or language can contain. Abkhazia, the disputed state on the Black Sea – once an opulent Soviet holiday resort with a multi-ethnic population – became a symbolic ghost town following the 1992-93 war with Georgia. Here, fragmented memories and dreams destroyed by violence and exile are exhumed through interpretive re-enactment and haunting sound.

The king, tormented by nightmares, seeks for the best dream to be able to sleep peacefully.

Rezo is a 70 year-old resident of the old people's house. He is tired of the lack of proper food at the institution, so he keeps notes from the local obituaries. He attends wakes of unknown individuals and stays for the dinner, which is the traditional feast that takes place after the funeral. At one such feast Rezo meets his former student, whom he taught Georgian dance in the 90's.

In 1121 AD, 56,000 Georgian warriors, led by King Davit IV, battled 500,000 Seljuks on the Didgori battlefield in the Kingdom of Georgia, whose outcome would determine the fate of Jerusalem and all of Christianity.

Shota Kalandadze's new movement in the cinema "cinema poems" this film reflects the Georgian legendary artistic personalities who are involved in this film through the eyes of Shota Kalandadze.

What happens when young Hitler meets young Stalin in Train in 1907 in Vienna Station?!

The couple finds a dead man at the hotel suite. It is a detective hired by the beloved husband. The minister must get rid of the dead body by all means. He calls for help his deputy.

A young taxi driver has lived a mundane life as a cab driver for quite some time. The faces have come and gone from his rear-view mirror. However, things change when two young man try to hijack his car in the middle of Georgian suburb.

The film depicts one of the most terrible and painful problems of Georgian reality - drug addiction. The heroes gradually lose their perception of reality and time. Everyday life becomes unbearable and unbearable, eventually the heroes will face the harsh reality.

Once people come in the bar, they see themselves who they really are. Different personalities with different stories interlock in four stories stimulated by ego, trust, vengeance, protest and alcohol

Flanked by her phlegmatic sidekick, Dariko is the only outside broadcast journalist at a local Georgian television channel. With derisory resources, she races from one report to another to give an honest, if not objective, image of the current events that shape her environment.

Many years after the war, two childhood friends with different political views, Aka and Mojito, meet in Europe. Their only reason for enmity was not politics, but that they both loved the same woman, Natia. Instead of reconciliation, events develop in such a way that the gap between them deepens even more.

Lado is nineteen when his father comes back home unexpectedly after a very long absence. The young man tries desperately to get some answers from his parent, but in vain. When his father leaves again, Lado goes back to his life of crime, together with his younger brother. He is left to answer the questions their father would not hear.

The first Georgian full-length documentary follows the trip of the “king of Georgian poetry”, Akaki Tsereteli, to Racha and Lechkhumi, and his relationships with the people living in the mountainous areas of Western Georgia

Two young step-brothers are locked in a room and are trying to to figure out personal relationships. Based on a play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

Nine-year-old Luka lives in a boarding school for deaf children. Somewhat hyperactive, the youngster finds it difficult to make friends, and he feels quite isolated – until he decides to take up traditional Georgian dancing and practise for the school’s end-of-year performance. Following this dream changes Luka’s life as he starts to feel the thrill of success.

The film describes the original story. Heart + Ltd. is an organization that helps desperate and hopeless people win over the hearts of people they love.

Prince Tariel is in the quest for his captured love, Nestan, but he fails. All attempts are in vain. He retires to a cave to live in the wilderness. Since then, he dresses in tiger skin, a reminder of his love. Help comes unexpectedly.

A young man comes out of his apartment and forgets his key for the car at home. He shouts after his mother to make her throwing the key out of the window. He is waiting for his mum.

Movie Overview (English) - Required (minimum 10 characters)

Akaki is a school teacher. He unexpectedly becomes an inheritor of a dying billionaire, who sold his assets around the world and returned to his homeland, Georgia. Akaki promises him to become a philanthropist. Anonymously he starts reaching out to different people and funding either their medical needs or different charity organizations. He feels his lifetime won't be enough to help all the people in the world. And his religious background makes him confident - the end is near. Ultimately he believes - "Maybe there will be no Apocalypse, there is still hope for the future, as long as we do good things for each other".

Returning home for the funeral of her grandmother, seventeen-year-old Ariadna must cross the unspoiled Georgian countryside to connect her grandmother’s soul with her resting body in an ancient burial custom. Traversing this exhausting and raw terrain, Ariadna is forced to confront the impact that the complex, sometimes cruel matriarch had on her not-so-distant childhood.

Naughty kids are back and now they have to help Okus, the extraterrestrial being, to return on his planet the lost Moneribus.

When a man decides to follow his faith, his family faces a crisis at a time of year usually filled with hope.

After 13 years, Tsitsi initiates a reunion of his former classmates with a seemingly harmless cause: they haven't seen each other since graduation and the reason for the gathering is to remember school and have a drink. However, Tsitsi has a secret motivation: he wants to punish his former classmate, Guga, who used to make life difficult for the entire class at school. Several male classmates gather at the school to drink and talk; as their time together progresses, Tsitsi gets drunk and tries to accomplish his goal.

The film's characters are elderly people, one of whom lives in Georgia and the other in Israel. Both receive letters with the same content: a stranger asks them for financial help...

I do not come blanket-covered from the dust of paper, or wallpaper, less from the variety show, I have always been in the warehouse close to the box of explosives.

Animation feature.

After the defeat in elections, Refugees Eviction Minister, Giorgi Mchedlishvili, loses everything that is dear to him: the office, the car, the source of income and most importantly - power. Giorgi’s chair, which is a live being, motivates former Minister to take actions, but these efforts do not bring the desired result. In these difficult times Giorgi meets Donara, refugee women, which he marries later. New government, orders eviction of Giorgi and his Family from his house. Former Minister puts himself in confrontation first with media, and then with Magda, Giorgi’s sister in law, and because of Magda the house is surrounded by journalists and police. After unsuccessful negotiations with the SWAT team the assault begins. With the help of chair, George, manages to escape grounds unseen towards his village.

The animated short film tells the story of the life and work of the world's first elected female member of the Parliament Azerbaijani-Georgian Pari Khanum Sofieva.

Two sisters bring a parcel to the grandfather’s house. The door is open and he is away. And because of that they have to make a choice.

Tamara looks after and old woman, Paola, and sends money to her husband and three kids. Suddenly her husband, Valiko dies in an accident. As an illegal immigrant, Tamara can not go to mourn him and decides to do it by cell phone.

Vladimir Putin reemerges after eight years as President and another four years as Prime Minister of The Federation of Russia

Georgians are enthusiastically engaged in the construction of BAM, which was declared as the construction of the century. Together with them, young people from all parts of the Soviet Union work there. Hard work is accompanied by romance.

Led by the good-hearted father Soso, a family of four starts a blueberry farm to secure their future together. But with a home in northern Georgia, their village is close to the troubled border with the Russian-backed region of Abkhazia, where new conflicts have been rumbling for 30 years. Soso is a retired engineer, but together with his wife Nino and their sons Giorgi and Lazare, he throws himself into the ‘Plant the Future’ programme set up by the Georgian authorities to stabilise the area. Nino is haunted by memories of the war and dreams of her children experiencing the world, while Soso wants to maintain their connection to the land. But Giorgi and Lazare long for a different future, immersing themselves in anime and dreaming of visiting Japan. In the midst of their daily lives, the family navigates between hardship, joy and contemplation of a different future.

A short documentary film made by Otar Iosseliani in 1967 for the Film Journal, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Vano Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, presenting an official chronicle of the anniversary celebrations.

Animation short

Vera recalls a day in the early 2000s. Summer, 16, visiting a friend who lives with her father in the countryside. She explores their world and re-records the memory as she tries to make sense of it.

Erotic Avant Garde Cinema By Shota Kalandadze.

An experimental and poetic interpretation of the eternal myth of the flood and salvation, made using the object cinema technique.

The main character is an executioner from the 1930s who carries out the sentences of the Triumvirate. The gravity of his case follows him everywhere - in his family, among his acquaintances, and does not give him rest, until he himself becomes a victim of the system he serves.

The journey of a group of friends in Guria (Georgia).

Khadijeh, an elderly Kurdish woman from Iran, has two pressing tasks - one, to care for a stork whose wings were injured by high-voltage wires and left behind; and two, to dissuade her daughter from emigrating to the UK. In her mind, there is no contradiction between helping the wounded bird migrate and preventing her own daughter from migrating. It’s just that they cannot be achieved by willpower alone. And of the two, changing her daughter’s mind is far more difficult.

'Hello Mel!' 10 episodes searching for the address. In 2001 on the GIFT Festival Christopher Marlowe's Faustus was held. The Faust was played by the young actor. The guests and the hosts got friends with each other and went on together. 'A letter to my friend in London'.

Stalin’s statue in the garden of a nunnery provokes discussion – plenty of it – in a small Georgian village. Some of the locals used to know Stalin personally because he visited the village several times when he was young, and they continue to see him as a benign ruler from the good old days rather than the brutal dictator he was. Whenever an episode of purge shook the Soviet Union’s republics, they hid the statue in the woods. The church also plays an important role in people’s lives. All in all, the film reveals a fundamental conflict in Georgian society.

"Two years ago [c. 1997], Tato Kotetishvili went to Georgia, his birthplace, where he hadn't been for ten years. After he had come to Holland and found a partner in Rotterdam, the civil war started in Georgia so he was unable to return home. The reason to go home now was a video tape of his wedding, where many Georgian relatives, friends and acquaintances were gathered together. Kotetishvili wanted to know what had panned [sic] to them, how his family had come through the war.The result of this journey was Nostalgia, a personal documentary that shows in an associative style the effects of the civil war on the lives and mutual contacts of Kotetishvili's family. Kotetishvili found out that life in Georgia had changed; what he hoped to find was gone, had changed or become grounds for conflict. He felt an outsider in his own country. The Georgia he knew was only a memory.Kotetishvili died suddenly just after returning to Holland. His partner Ineke Smits completed Nostalgia."