Keep the humour going 

Sandro is a teacher in Tbilisi. He is 40 years old and lives with his parents, who constantly interfere in his life. A wife is what’s needed. His friend Iva pushes him to try blind dating but it doesn’t seem to click. Then, on an outing to the Black Sea, Sandro falls in love with hairdresser Manana whose husband is in jail. The problem is that the husband is due to be released soon, after which Sandro’s life will take a surreal turn. This scene takes us straight to the heart of Georgian cinema. 

Blind Dates is the title of Levan Koguashvili’s debut film. He was born in Tbilisi in 1973 and studied in Moscow at the State Institute of Cinematography which until the 1990s was the standard route to filmmaking. I am singling out this particular film as a shining example because Koguashvili understands how to focus on what is essential, on a few characters that he tenderly develops. They carry the blues of the times on their slender shoulders and look a bit lost in a world that appears manageably compact and yet, somehow, is still too big for everyone.

This approach places Koguashvili in a cinematic tradition that stood gratifyingly apart from Moscow's diktats even during the Soviet era. Georgian filmmakers focus on the mundane, placing their characters in settings that are as revealing as the plot. Nothing is rushed; the pace is laconic. Brevity is a defining feature of these films. Everything is understated. Regardless of what happens, the characters are resigned to their fate and bear everything with stoic composure. 

The forerunners of this form of cinema worked during the Soviet era. Otar Iosseliani (Pastorale 1975) and Eldar Shengelaia (Blue Mountains 1983) are two such names who understood how to observe the course of events in the stillness of time with visual perspicacity. For one, the lyricism in the flow of life bore fruit; for the other it was the absurdities of the bureaucracy. Their work shared the same fundamentally impish gaze, fine irony and dry humour. Iosseliani would later go into exile, like Dito Tsintsadze, Nana Jorjadze and Nino Kirtadze before him, when he could no longer bear the censorship.

There is a striking presence of women in the history of Georgian cinema. Apart from the latter two, there was also Lana Gogoberidze, who went on to become the president of the International Association of Women Directors in 1988. In her autobiography she writes, "Georgia is a small, lonely, abandoned nation surrounded by large and powerful countries. They fought against us, attacked us, destroyed our cathedrals and churches. Yet we survived. And what’s more important, our culture survived."

In the 1920s, after the country briefly declared itself independent, the Tbilisi avant-garde emerged, in which Konstantin Mikaberidze's anti-bureaucratic satire, My Grandmother (1929), stands out. It was the first film to be banned in Georgia. During the dark days of the Soviet Union under Stalin, himself a Georgian, everything had to fit a standard format, and the dictator personally viewed all films to decide which could be approved for screening. Stalin's death in 1953 was followed by a period of thaw under Khrushchev. It was no coincidence that a Georgian, Mikhail Kalatozov, sparked a small wave of cinematic freedom in 1957 and was awarded the Palme D'Or at Cannes for his film The Cranes are Flying.

After Georgia regained its independence, the Georgian National Film Centre was established in Tbilisi in 2001. George Ovashvili, who tasted international success with his films The Other Bank (2010) and Corn Island (2014) says, “After the collapse of the Soviet Union we were not in a position to build a new film industry. In the early 2000s we ushered in a new era of Georgian cinema, but unfortunately no government till today has understood the importance of cinema for our country. What we are making is not really Georgian cinema. It's actually a culmination of the efforts of individuals who want to make films.” 

Looking at the films, it is clear that making movies is not possible without co-production, even if the budget is just 10% of a Swiss production. France has emerged as a partner country. Filmmakers in exile produce from their new home country when they film in Georgia, which is why one sees Georgian-German-Luxembourgian-Bulgarian-Czech-Turkish co-productions. Ovashvili does see some benefits to being forced to go in for international funding. "On our sets we have 13 national flags and 13 languages are spoken. The result is a unique and universal language: cinema. I believe that the diversity of the team has enriched and made the universal theme of the film more powerful."

Georgian films have a tranquil gaze and take up issues that impinge on our daily lives, even those that are taboo. In Pipeline Next Door, Nino Kirtadze delves into the construction of a pipeline through the Caucasus. She depicts the inventiveness of the rural population in dealing with the inevitable (European Film Prize 2005).

Georgian-German duo Nana Ekvitimishvili and Simon Gross made it to Cannes in 2014 with In Bloom, which narrates how the lives of two girls in Tbilisi change as they are caught in the crossfire of the civil war in 1992.

In And Then We Danced (2019), Levan Akin engages with the love story of two men in the Georgian National Ensemble, which resulted in protests by homophobic nationalists supported by the Orthodox Church. Two years later, in Wet Sand, Elene Naveriani tells another story of closeted love between two women who find each other. 

Georgia is a poor country with a strongly patriarchal and Christian Orthodox population of 3.5 million people. The portrayal of women characters in films like Wet Sand or Otar’s Death by Ioseb Bliadze (2021) is thus even more significant. In Otar’s Death, two single mothers are the main protagonists in a story about a young man who runs over an elderly man, whose family smells an opportunity to milk money from his death. Bliadze observes the corruption and a society that is torn between the rural and urban.

Since 2022, a new aspect has been added. After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, over 120,000 relatively affluent Russians have fled to Georgia. A Georgian film producer described the situation to me in August 2023: "Our lives have changed drastically after the war. Unfortunately, many Russians have settled in Georgia and bought houses, flats and shops. The Russian aggression is impacting all aspects of our lives, even cinema."

* Walter Ruggle is a journalist. From 1999 to 2020 he headed the trigon-film foundation, which engages with cinema from the Global South and East.