The time when the release of a new Georgian film was a special event is long gone. Starting from Tbilisi, where there used to be more than twenty cinemas ending with the highland villages, where there was a mobile cinema set, which was carried by car (and in heavy snow – by cart) to the waiting audience. Today, the premiere of a new film will be shown successfully in any of the few capital's cinema halls, it will go around foreign film festival screens...
It's good when a filmmaker makes a film along with like-minded people. In Levan Koguashvili’s case, like-minded to him, first of all, is Boris Frumin – director, screenwriter, producer, teacher, who taught him film directing in his master's degree at the Tisch School of Art of New York University. Frumin is the co-author of Koguashvili's film scripts: "Street Days" (2010), "Blind Dates" (2013) and the screenwriter of the film, "Brighton 4th" (2021). Koguashvili has another like-minded person, Kote Japaridze, who ...
"They co-exist and they don't co-exist" - this is how Nika explains Dachi what negative numbers are. Nika and Dachi are inmates of a juvenile detention institution just like their peers there - rejected by society and sometimes, even by their families. "Negative Numbers" (2019) is a film by Uta Beria, which is shown to children in different regions of Georgia as part of the "Cinema at School" project and then discussed. It's a good project and a good choice of film. The topics, which take an artistic form in this film, constantly excite any society: people stuck in prison, especially the under-aged; dishonest representatives of justice; the effects of the criminal world on children and adolescents and on society in general; oppression of a person by another one, superior to him, or by a system.
It's night. Ramo and Makho are stealing the railway tracks, are in a hurry... Shalva Sokurashvili's camera nervously follows their movement. This camera is one of the active heroes of the film, which sometimes conveys other characters’ inner state, or sometimes is an objective narrator, goes away and forces you to discover new details as if in an already familiar image, in order to immerse yourself...