Most films show war with noise, action, confrontation but there is another way - a slow, silent one, based on things. Nino Gogua’s documentary “The Things” (2017) is the representative of this different language. It speaks with things, the archive of the past and silence. It is not just a chronicle of displacement, it is a cinematic attempt to restore the idea of home in a space where home no longer exists but things still speak. What remains when a house is taken away, words are silenced, and time no longer moves? Perhaps – a thing, a simple object that has survived, has been displaced, but has not been lost.
“The Things” belongs to that documentary work that combines precision, emotional depth, and visual diversity. This film does not tell the stories of war and trauma directly. It does not show us explosions, tear gas, or wounds. On the contrary, “The Things” offers us a space where silence speaks, and the shot becomes an emotional experience.
The plot is almost minimal. In Khurvaleti, the people living in the IDP settlement carry on their daily lives. They do laundry, wash dishes, work in the garden, but reality is revealed precisely in this everyday life, in the routine that hides a difficult political and personal past. The characters may not speak directly about politics, war, or territories but the objects locked away in the depths of their rooms tell about lost homes in their own language. The house where they should live no longer exists, it has been looted, burned down, or destroyed, but the objects have survived, and now they are in another space, in strange apartments.
The first thing you notice in the film is immobility. In static shots, in which time does not flow but stands still, the camera does not disrupt space or interfere with the action. It coexists with the environment, people, and objects. It guides the mood so that the viewer tries to see what does not move, to grasp the purpose of the object.
The camera is often centralized or symmetrical, as if finding a central place for the object or human figure is a necessary condition. For example, a woman sits on a chair, behind her is emptiness, the light partially illuminates her. She tells us how she brought the only old chessboard. It is a simple story, but the shot is planned in such a way that the viewer feels not only the words of this woman, but also the value of the object sitting in her memory.
This value is also emphasized by the colorful environment of the film. The color palette chosen by Gogua is gray, brown, and light green, as if it were part of the invisible painting that the past leaves on objects. There are no contrasts. There is neither sharp light nor deep shadow. The colors seem to be dissolved, scattered in the environment, frozen. This emotional neutrality, at the level of color, creates the psychological pace of the film - monotonous, quiet, but extremely intense from the inside. The film shows that objects possess an emotional value that sometimes exceeds words. The very existence of these objects tells us about war, memory, the silence left in a taken home. They are not victims, but grieving survivors, just like people from whom the war took not a home, but a place in space. It does not offer us film music, it does not shout, it does not tell us about heroes. It distracts us from hearing sounds - the howling of the wind, the creaking of a door, the crunch of footsteps on the ground.
“The Things” is both documentary and poetic at the same time. There is no sharp action, no climax in it. This documentary stylization approaches slow cinema, where image and time become equally important. It shows us neither heroes nor outdated pathos. It invites us to be in silence where war is not heard, but its remnants appear to us as things. The form of the film sharply contrasts with the pace of informational documentary. Its camera remains at one point, frozen in space, as if trying to penetrate the depths of things. It makes no comment, does not search an event, drama, or decisive moment and it is at this point that the critical limit is reached, where the things themselves become the characters of the film.
The slow movement of the work forces us to pause. What may seem like an inanimate slow motion in the first ten minutes soon transforms into visual art: time that is stretched out, objects that no longer move, but force us to be with them.
The overall aesthetics - the composition of the shot, color and sound - are delicately and closely connected to the symbolism of these objects. The camera, for the most part, captures the objects and the space around them in natural light, which creates a visual dialogue between the object and the human living environment. The strict, stark composition of the shots makes us think about the importance of how these objects are poetically presented, as if they had fallen into the darkness of time.
The color palette in the film is quite adapted to the difficult situation of the displaced people's lives. Dusty, natural, incongruous colors dominate here, creating a heavy and delicate composition. These are not dark dramatic colors but pale, almost moody tones, which reflect the sad reality from the inside. For example, the shades of brown, gray, and green not only visually contribute to the formation of the displaced space, but also connect with their history, as well as the period when these objects were still actively used.
The sound background in the film often includes the sounds of the natural environment - the howling of the wind, soft singing, meditative silence, and captures the daily struggle of a person tired of war. Noise in this film is not just background nature. It becomes the main character when the person stops talking and the director stops asking questions. Sounds tell us a story. It is shown that trauma and memory are conveyed not only through words, but also through objects. The sound of objects, their arrangement, and space create a metaphor for people's lost home and memory. Objects do not simply store information, but also speak about trauma themselves.
Here, a chessboard, a gun left by a grandfather, or ancestors’ old, faded pictures are no longer ordinary objects, but become tangible symbols that remind people of the past and the lost home. In this new environment, things seem to struggle to maintain their meaning and function.
The film represents a cinematic dialogue in modern feature and documentary cinema, in which the poetics of the shot and meditative silence play a central role, where natural lighting, slow motion, and visual meditation on the large and small details of life are prominent.
In this film, objects themselves become history, not only carriers of memories but also active participants in memory. They speak, while the main characters are silent. The object becomes a bridge between spaces: between the old house and the new shelter, between the lost and the existence in the present. In this way, “The Things” offers us a cinematic alternative for the transmission of trauma. It does not show the horror of war directly, but shows the emptiness left by it.
“The Things” is one of those rare Georgian documentaries that creates a visual memory not for the media, but for a person who continues to live after the war, although already with the logic of things. This is a film not about death, but about survival, the one that also carries sadness though.
Not a war analytical portrait is created but the archive - cosy, delicate and inconspicuous which possesses a great political power. It reminds us that things do remain the firmest witnesses at war and just they are able to say something that can’t be pronounced by a word.
“The Things” is not just a documentary about displacement. It shows us how cinema can become an archive of trauma through sound, light and objects. The film does not scream, and it is in this silence that the strongest voice is born. This silence is a structure transformed into the sound of confiscated homes, erased time, and unbroken memory. The film is not only a social document, but also becomes a philosophical poem about how things contain people and how they continue to live in the forms of the past. It reflects that war is not only the exhaustion of people, but also the tragedy of things and spaces.
Teona Vekua
