Tengiz Abuladze

The events just before, during and after World War Two have little direct effect on the inhabitants of the village inGeorgia where Zuriko lives. A schoolboy, Zuriko goes to the schoolhouse with his previously unlettered grandmother, who is receiving an education alongside him. He has some loyal, if slightly addled friends in the person of a myopic hunter named Illarion, and a one-eyed man named Illiko. So nearsighted is Illarion that on one occasion he shot Zuriko’s dog because the took it for a rabbit. The loyalty of his friends is proven after the war, when they sell the cow they all own in order to send Zuriko to college in Tblisi. This black and white film is notable for several things: its loving portrayal of the Georgian country people and countryside, and the fact that it was made by (Tenghiz Abuladze, who went on to make the extremely significant, award-winning 1984 film Monanieba, also known as Pokayaniye, or Repentance.Read More »

This chamber drama is set in Georgia on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A simple peasant family makes its living by selling yogurt which the Magdany widow takes every morning to the town market. Once, in their mother’s absence, the children – six-year-old Mikho and three-year-old Kato – found an abandoned donkey on a road leading to their village. The foundling was fed, tended, and the moment the donkey opened its big, tender eyes, it was named “Lurdja”, which means “blue-eyed”. Surrounded by love and care, the donkey became a big help in the poor household. But this idyll was not to last long…

Winner – Palme d’Or, Cannes IFF, 1956Read 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 »

Based on the works of the Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela, this influential classic follows a Christian soldier in the Caucasus at the turn of the twentieth century. When he refuses to cut off his enemy’s hand, he is ostracised by his fellow villagers and sent into exile. Wandering through the wilderness in what seems like a dream, he arrives in a Muslim village, where he is sent to the top of a mountain to freeze to death.Read More »

synopsis
Repentance (Pokayaniye) features Avtandil Makharadze in a dual role. As Georgian mayor Varlam Aravidze, Makharadze is a strutting, arbitrarily cruel dictator, something of a composite Stalin and Hitler. Visually he very closely resembles Lavrentiy Beriya, Stalin’s right hander and one-time KGB chief. As Abel, the mayor’s son, Makharadze finds himself in the middle of an ideological squabble when his father dies. Zeinab Botsvadze, a local woman who had suffered mightily under the mayor’s regime, refuses to allow the old man’s corpse to be interred.Read More »

Three guys are living in a Dagestan aul, and all three are in love with the blue-eyed Serminaz. According to a mountaineers’ tradition, a young man seeking the hand and the heart of a beloved girl has to make her a present that she would remember for the rest of her life. The friends set out in search of the special gift…Read More »

This adaptation of Giorgi Leonidze’s short stories sees twenty-two episodes coalesce into one phantasmagoric narrative. Set in pre-revolutionary Georgia, it follows a young woman forced into marriage by her village elders despite her love for another man. Drifting poetically from one incident to the next, this gorgeously sustained pastorale from one of Georgia’s great auteurs creates a sense of the rich tapestry of Georgian village life, and the tragic consequences of community dispute.Read More »