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.

I.Grandmother.Illiko.and.Illarion.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 29 min
Size: 	1.24 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	716x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 800 kb/s
BPP: 	0.182
Audio
#1:  	Russian 5.1ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/4752E3E875AAEA1/I.Grandmother.Illiko.and.Illarion.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English, Russian

The post Tengiz Abuladze – Me, bebia, Iliko da Ilarioni AKA I, Grandmother, Illiko & Illarion (1962) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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, 1956

Magdana's Donkey (1955) -- Tengiz Abuladze, Rezo Chkheidze.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	50mn 37s
Size: 	926 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	672x560 ~> 746x560
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 100 Kbps
BPP: 	0.233
Audio
#1:  	Georgian 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/718628D564BDCB8/Magdana’s_Donkey_(1955)_–_Tengiz_Abuladze,_Rezo_Chkheidze.mkv

Language(s):Georgian
Subtitles:English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian (muxed)

The post Tengiz Abuladze & Rezo Chkheidze – Magdanas lurja AKA Magdana’s Donkey (1956) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Skhvisi shvilebi 1958.mkv
General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 12 min
Size: 	1.12 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	704x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 012 kb/s
BPP: 	0.198
Audio
#1:  	Russian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/701005E85E46C3D/Skhvisi_shvilebi_1958.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6293F35796FE93F/Somebody_else’s_children_EN_02.srt

https://fikper.com/O2sbDD4hzN/Skhvisi_shvilebi_1958.mkv
https://fikper.com/XdIIMHrkJP/Somebody_else’s_children_EN_02.srt

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Tengiz Abuladze – Skhvisi shvilebi AKA Somebody Else’s Children (1958) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Based on the epic poetry of Georgian literary hero Vazha-Pshavela (the pen-name of Luka Razikashvili), The Plea is a ghostly meditation on religious conflict and the cruelties and suffering it engenders. It has a filmic language and symbolism born from the transfugurative overcoming of human suffering, beyond which lies either chaos or salvation. It is the first film of Tengiz Abuladze’s famous trilogy, preceding The Wishing Tree (1976) and Repentance (1987). If one thing binds these three films, it is Abuladze’s enduring belief that one should say “only the truth, to say yes if your heart says yes, to say no if your heart says no”. Faithful to this philosophy, The Plea glances back upon the past with unwavering honesty and lyrical ambition. The dialogue, entirely made up of poetic verse, is mostly narrated over faces that should be speaking, but whose voiceless expressions and inward thoughts alone speak more faithfully to Vazha-Pshavela’s vision and the spirit of Georgia as a nation scarred by religious enmity.

Aesthetically and musically, the influences are varied. The pilgrim at times resembles Bergman’s Antonius Block, and there is a funeral procession towards the end of the film reminiscent of Theodor Dreyer. And of course, like Parajanov, Abuladze gives us a modernist take on a culturally specific literature and topography. However, Nodar Gabunia’s score and Aleksandr Antipenko’s cinematography make it feel like a unique vision in its own right, translating poetry to screen with a decisiveness and confidence unmatched by other filmmakers of the period.

“Don’t let me just live and breed,” the narrator pleads during the film’s opening sequence. A pilgrim (who, we assume, is also the narrator) is wandering through a seemingly timeless wilderness with an insatiable thirst “to grow the sprouts of joy” before he meets his death. The story centres around two episodes of conflict in the mountains between the Muslim Kistins and the Christian Khevsurs. The pilgrim, Aluda (a Khevsur), is on the hunt for a Kistin horse thief named Mutsil, which results in a solemn shootout framed by the cascading meltwater of the surrounding mountains. Mutsil is eventually shot dead, although Aluda’s triumph is coupled with a sudden realisation of his enemy’s innate human dignity. In light of such an epiphany, he renounces the Khevsur custom of cutting off his enemy’s hand. To his fellow villagers’ dismay, he responds with an even more radical renunciation of local custom: he also wants to make a sacrifice in honour of the murdered Kitsin. As a result of his sacrilegious pronouncements, the villagers turn on him and is home is destroyed.

The pilgrim of the second story will go on to tell a farmer of how his home was sacked, suggesting that we are now following Aluda on his subsequent wanderings (though, mysteriously, he calls himself Nunua and is played by a different actor). The story has been now reversed, and it is a Kistin hunter named Dzhokola who finds in it his heart to help the lone Khevsur traveller. As with the previous story, the Kistin villagers are outraged that he should be so generous to someone who, as it turns out, is known recently to have killed two local Kistins. Unsurprisingly, they call for revenge, but their protestations fall on deaf ears. Dzhokola, unperturbed by their accusations, insists that his faith requires that he be hospitable to his guest, irrespective of his creed. As in the previous episode, his behaviour doesn’t go unpunished, and, even more severely than before, he is made to watch the traveller perish and is then executed.

The two stories, then, involve men of enemy faiths who nonetheless recognise each other’s innate humanity, revealing how the moral codes of individuals and communities intersect and often rupture. Theologically, it contends that good and evil, far from being two separate competing entities, are inextricably linked and thus experienced in degrees. Abuladze invokes and transcends the poetic vision of Vazha-Pshavela, transposing the latter’s critical eye to the Soviet way of being as a powerful challenge to received notions of justice, oppression and social conformity.

The.Plea.1968.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 15mn
Size: 	1.43 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 533 Kbps
BPP: 	0.051
Audio
#1:  	Georgian 1.0ch AAC @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/9F172DE5A18BFB2/The.Plea.1968.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-KG.mkv

Language(s):Georgian
Subtitles:English

The post Tengiz Abuladze – Vedreba AKA The Plea (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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. Despite the son’s Herculean efforts, Botsvadze continues digging up the late mayor’s body, a symbolic gesture to prevent the dead man’s villainy from being forgotten. Repentance was the first Soviet film that openly denounced the horrors of Stalinism, though the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze (known for his poetic and surrealist films) chose to make it allegorical, deliberately using anachronisms and making the leading character look like a combination of Stalin’s henchman Lavrenti Beriya, Hitler, and Mussolini. An interesting point — the last name chosen for the leading character is totally fictional, there is no such name as Aravidze in Georgia. In fact, “aravi” means “nobody” in Georgian. The filmmakers opted for such a name in order not to offend any real person in the Republic of Georgia. Filmed in 1984, Repentance fell victim to Soviet censorship from the moment it left the editing room. When it was finally released in 1987, the film was deservedly garlanded with several awards, including the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize.
ial turn this film into a searing allegory of the brutal repressions, and heroic sacrifices, of the country’s Stalinist era—–by Hal Erickson

Banned in the Soviet Union

Following Abuladze won:
– FIPRESCI Prize
– Grand Prize of the Jury @ Cannes (unanimously)
– Prize of the Ecumenical Jury

Nominated for the Golden Palm and the Golden Globe and so on.

Repentance.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 30mn
Size:	2.39 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Not met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	718x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	2 000 Kbps
Audio
5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/AEFC62418104D5C/Repentance.mkv

Language(s):Georgian
Subtitles:English,Spanish,French,Arabic,Chinese,Dutch,German,Hebrew,Italian,Japanese,Portuguese,Russian,Swedish

Many thanks to @Marko for the rip.

The post Tengiz Abuladze – Monanieba aka Repetance (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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…

https://nitro.download/view/741528AB60FBA2D/Ozherel_e_DVDRip_745mb.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/3E032B1B2A716EB/Ozherele.ENG.srt

Language:Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Tengiz Abuladze – Samkauli satrposatvis aka Necklace for My Beloved aka Ozherele dlya moey lyubimoy (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

A user IMDB review of Tengiz Abuladze’s film, entitled ‘Puzzle’ begins as follows, ‘Beauty of nature. Force of traditions. Sad love story. A myth. Lost time. Wisdom, fool, expectation, nuances of cruelty. And the verdict – cold and harsh.’ Most submitted user critical responses on forums, sites and blogs tend to use a similar listing technique to describe The Wishing Tree, (1976) and their experience and impression of it. In an internet world full of posturing and over-explanation, it is particularly wonderful that the majority of viewer responses appear to acquiesce to the experience; and the privilege awarded to the unspoken in Abuladze’s work.

Set at the turn of the century, in pre- revolutionary Georgia, Abuladze’s film is based on on the stories of Giorgi Leonidze. Leonidze, who was born prior to Georgia’s absorption into the Soviet Union, had to express his patriotism in the 1930s through a literary return to the mythological and folkloric foundations of Georgian culture, instead of contemporary preoccupations. He was raised in a village in Kakheti, and his memoirs are a blend of memory, myth and fiction that serve as the basis for Abuladze’s film. The village in The Wishing Tree is a place that hums with spiritual reverence and a deep association with the mythologies that underpin humanity. There is the fortune teller, who was once a beauty and now waits endlessly for her lost love, having let her youth slip through her fingers whilst she pined. She is ridiculed constantly by the other villagers for her missed opportunities and lofty aspirations. There is the holy fool, who walks around in search of a tree that can grant wishes; the village’s ‘loose woman’, ostracised by the other women; and the tale of a forbidden love that ties all the various plot threads together.

The Wishing Tree is the second in Abuladze’s loose trilogy, released between the better known precursor and successor, The Plea (1967) and Repentance (1987) . It is a beautiful film in its own right and a valuable piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding Abuladze’s artistic motivations and perspectives. In Leonidze’s original text, Marita’s death is accompanied by a storm over the social injustice of her exile, and the villagers respond with reverence for her memory. However, in the film Marita dies alone in the mud and her grandmother is the only one that mourns. This is a signal of Abuladze’s deep-seated despair at Georgia’s fate. Changing the ending to one far more desolate, and in combination with the message of the other films in the trilogy, his perspective is apparent. This is further emboldened by the clear link between Marita and Georgia itself. She serves as a feminine symbol of a vibrant and beautiful motherland, and the tragedy in the way she is treated. The embedded relationship between people, nature and symbols that Abuladze displays is cyclical. In one scene Marita and Gedia go for a walk alone. They sit on the side of the hill and she tells him that, “The dew on the grass is the earth’s tears… everything on earth has a soul”. This statement strengthens the amorphous connection between events and nature.

The film starts with a death and ends with a death. At the beginning the white horse dies after grazing on the grass on the far side of the hill, it is said that this is due to the vengeful spirits of Georgia’s enemies whose blood was spilled there. The horse’s death is a striking image, a white horse lying down amongst red flowers is the tragically beautiful essence of folklore and mythology. At the film’s end a pomegranate flower grows, “like Marita’s face”, perhaps a symbol of Georgia’s potential for replenishment and the cyclical nature of life. The imagery is one of the uniquely powerful aspects of Abuladze’s films. Myths and folklore are predominantly oral traditions, and a certain amount of imagination is required to conjure images of long extant or fantastical events.

However, in Abuladze’s hands legend comes to life, haunting and ethereal in its execution. The images of Marita being pulled through the rain and mud gain a religious quality. The white painted face of the fortune teller wildly trying to disguise her age, develops a certain pathos. The Holy Fool in tattered robes, with his ear placed to the ground, evokes a sense of the ancient and primordial. The user review , “Puzzle” is exactly right when it notes that The Wishing Tree is not exactly a film, but an object for meditation that uses the ancient archetypes to take the viewer on a journey through forbidden love and the loss of a nation.

	
The.Wishing.Tree.1976.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 45mn
Size: 	4.15 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	5 443 Kbps
BPP: 	0.109
Audio
#1:  	Georgian 2.0ch AAC @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/64CFE2686CE9072/The.Wishing.Tree.1976.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-KG.mkv

Language(s):Georgian
Subtitles:English (Hardcoded)

The post Tengiz Abuladze – Natvris khe aka The Wishing Tree (1976) first appeared on Cinema of the World.