Niko Lortkipanidze’s “Tragedy Without a Hero” is one of the most horrifying and painful works of Georgian literature, a story of the inevitable confrontation between human self-respect, conscience and poverty. Revaz Nasidze’s film of the same name (2024) breathes new life into this topic, giving it color and flow. The literary text is transformed into a cinematic tragedy, where the main character is not a person, but the gradual disintegration of humanity and the process of losing conscience. The director does not try to simply transfer literature to the screen - he creates an independent cinematic language that develops the spiritual content of the text in a new, visual dimension.
No heroes, no villains are here but only hunger, shame and the destruction of man. The film narrates about a simple peasant who is driven to desperate action in extreme poverty and against the backdrop of children suffering from hunger. The director emphasizes what is most unbearable - a person loses not only strength, but also dignity, humanity, and, ultimately, himself in the face of hunger.
The action begins at a cemetery. With a quiet, almost static shot, where Iese stands at his wife's grave. The camera is motionless, the wind is blowing, the sounds of nature are heard, but the person is lost in silence. From that moment on, the viewer feels that the film will speak the language of silence. Here begins not only a story about orphans and poverty, but also a story about the loss of the soul. Poverty is not shown as a social statistic, but as an existence that slowly consumes a person.
The next scene, where Iese tries to knock down from a tree a bird's nest with eggs, is enough for the viewer to understand what kind of limit is crossed when a person destroys a symbol of life in order to save himself. Going home empty-handed, Iese sees a neighbor feeding meat to a dog. This simple detail says more than any dialogue. The world is unfairly arranged, where even an animal deserves more happiness than hungry children do.
The father turns into an instinctive being while baking a loaf of maize-bread from a small amount of flour borrowed from his godfather. The smell that comes out of the pan is no longer just the aroma of food but a temptation that the father cannot resist and eats the children's share as well. He eats with a sense of guilt, which is already beginning to destroy him internally. This action becomes the result not of evil but of human despair. His conscience punishes him and unable to cope with the guilt and the hungry faces of his children he kills himself in the end. In the morning, a neighbor woman, seeing Iese hanged, laments: "Who will take care of the starving orphans?" This scene is the climax of the film - a death that is born of regret, but no longer saves anyone.
The cameraman’s work is particularly notable for its natural light, muted tones and the stretched rhythm of time, which creates a world where every second lasts forever. The space is rarely shown in its entirety, reflecting the poverty from which there is no way out. The camera silently follows the hero, as if trying not to disturb his loneliness. The expansive shots, the foggy environment, the empty yards, and the pale sky seem to participate in defining a person's life. The camera often stops on the hero's face, which is immersed in silence. This silence is one of the main techniques of the film. The sound often disappears so that the viewer can hear his own inner cry.
The director uses sounds as an emotional rhythm: the rustling of the wind, the crackling of the fire, the chirping of a bird - all this acquires a symbolic meaning. When the father eats the maize-bread, the silence is so intense that the world seems to have held its breath. In such moments, several feelings arise at once: disgust, shame, compassion, weakness.
The episode of eating the maize-bread is the emotional core of the film. The director does not resort to moralistic justification. He does not justify or expose the main character. He simply shows reality. The camera looks at the man from a little distance, his face is half-shadowed, as if he himself cannot bear his own gaze. The focus shifts to the hands that are nervously breaking the bread. This scene makes it clear: a person is weak in the face of his own desires. The rhythm develops slowly. The author seems to make us feel the emptiness that is in the soul of the hero himself.
Niko Lortkipanidze's short story is minimalist but has boundless psychological depth. Nasidze accurately felt this inner dynamic and decided that the main task would be to convey this invisible movement, the pain of conscience and human helplessness on the screen. The film shows respect for the literary source. Part of the dialogues are conveyed almost unchanged, and the characters’ psychological conflicts are conveyed with caution, although the director is not limited to words, he creates visual parallels, a play with the rhythm of the shots and color, which strengthen the emotional background of the text. This is where the difference between the nature of literature and cinema appears - if the story tells us about moral fear from the inside, the film shows it to us from the outside, on a human face, in space, in silence.
Just as the text is devoid of excessive emotion, decorative phrases and moralistic interference, this line continues in the film, which gives it real strength. Thus, the visual form becomes a philosophical tool. Cinema no longer tells us a story, but allows us to experience it. This is how the film transcends literary boundaries and creates an independent artistic world.
In this work, special attention is paid to the naturalness of the actors. The main character, Iese (Ramaz Ioseliani), conveys what is being said with his eyes. The role of a father, whom life puts before his conscience, is performed with amazing restraint. The actor refused pathos, dramatic gestures or loud emotions. It is precisely in this restraint that his strength lies. The hero seems unable to express his fear, but the audience sees it in his eyes, in his movements in a suspended breath. He seems to be trying not to act, but to go through this tragedy with the viewer. His movement is slow, his words are short, and his gaze is deep. The secondary characters, especially the female figure (Darejan Kharshiladze), who acts as a moral mirror for the hero, completely fill the film. They do not exist only for the plot. Their presence carries a symbolic meaning, and the children's natural behavior intensifies the realism. The actors’ each expression, movement, and pause becomes part of the idea. The father's face is a metaphor for hunger, and the children, with their peace and silence, create the background line that enhances the tragedy of the plot.
The music appears when the emotional point has already been reached. "Nanaila" performed by the ensemble "Ialoni" says more than words. The music intensifies the hero’s guilt, fear and the never-ending internal dialogue that Lortkipanidze described in his text with words, while Nasidze described in the cinematic language. Thus, the director shows not only the tragedy of one family but also a mirror of the entire society, a society where compassion has become distant and a person has to fight alone for survival.
This is a film that speaks in silence, which is rare in Georgian cinema. “Tragedy Without a Hero” shows that Georgian literature and Georgian cinema can still have a dialogue not only at the level of text and image but also at the level of time and memory. This is where the true power of art is born.
Teona Vekua
