Emptiness, the feeling that comes with pain and loneliness after the departure of a loved one. This feeling cannot go away. Neither friends nor others can replace parents. After they are gone, life becomes different, colorless, and there are no new blank pages to start all over again. When you stay alone, pains surround you, you leave your body and look at yourself from the outside. You realize that you are in chaos, there is obscurity around you and there is no way out of it. You have only two choices: ...

EMPTINESS Read More

Khatuna Vashadze's debut film, "Bullet" (2022) is quite eloquent and memorable, which leaves the audience with something to think about. It shows a cruel world where one unintentional action can destroy an entire life. When a little boy on a picnic is hit by a blind bullet, a happy family life is destroyed, a once ideal existence turns into torture. The father is trying to somehow save the family, the mother is mourning, the police are powerless, there are no witnesses, there is nothing to do, and the case is closed in a few months. The father will have to find...

CAUSE OF DISASTER – BULLET THAT MISSED THE TARGET Read More

Different branches of art have their expressive means. Painting uses visual forms, literature uses words, and cinema uses both (and, of course, many more). It is interesting to observe how the same message, topic, is transferred from one field of art to another or how a work of one field becomes an inspiration for a work of another (and sometimes third) field of art. Such is Niko Pirosmani's painting, "Kakhetian Train," which first became the basis for Archil Kikodze's story of the same name, and then this story became a film directed by Lali ...

WHERE IS THE TRAIN COMING FROM Read More

Cinema art, with its versatile means of expression, offers the director various opportunities to convey his message to the audience in one form or another. How the director will use this opportunity depends on his talent. An original vision, a distinctive style of narration, relevant topics and many other factors determine the success of the film. One of the most important roles is played by a film narrative, the story development and the film structure which maintains its...

SOCIAL STIGMA AS THREAT TO DISTINCTNESS Read More

When one loses a parent, he is orphaned, when – a spouse, he is widowed but when a child dies, it is so terrible that people have not even found a name for it. It is difficult to find an analogue of this tragedy and imagine yourself in the parent’s place. Tinatin Emiridze, with her short film "Black Sea" (2021), tries to convey to the audience the full depth and magnitude of this tragedy. This is a story about a family that tragically...

RETURN TO LIFE Read More

A prison is a place where a person’s word has no meaning. Everything is in the hands of only one person, the warden, and it is he who controls what will happen inside the walls. The weak rarely survive, the strong become watchers of the prison and are subject to the warden throughout their stay. Freedom ends at the prison door. The bars surround a person like a snake and suffocate him until he takes his last breath. Everything ...

TICKET TO EXIT JAIL Read More

The Georgian film program at the 24th Tbilisi International Festival could be said to be the weakest in the history of this festival, although there were "pearls" that stood out and provided the audience with amazing emotions. Such an exceptionally good film was Giorgi Varsimashvili and Jeanne Nouchi’s film "Hotel "Metalurg" (2023), which tells the story of the displaced people from Abkhazia staying in Hotel "Metalurg" (Tskaltubo, Georgia), for whom this building became ...

NATIVE "METALURG" Read More

When directors started looking for unique techniques and authorial style to express a multifaceted idea, was the time when the fable narrative was created in cinema. Without specifying the place and time, by camouflaging, so as to reflect the images of many people in one character, not to offend anyone and to criticize everyone, at the same time. A great example of this is Tinatin Kajrishvili's film, “Citizen Saint” (2023) – a philosophical fable about faith, fear, people and their weaknesses. It reflects everything earthly and fabulous. The ...

LOVELY AND SPECTACULAR Read More