The Pankisi Gorge is situated in north east Georgia, nestled between the Caucasian mountains. It’s been the home of the Muslim Kists for ages, and that of Altzaney, too, for the past 80 years. The old woman has a special position in this patriarchal society: as the mediator between the worlds of the dead and the living, as a wise adviser in existential decisions. Nino Orjonikidze and Vano Arsenishvili bring their camera very close to Altzaney, filming her face and its wrinkles, her hands and their gestures, with sidelong glances to the white laundry flapping in the wind. These images come together to form the intimate portrait of an exceptional woman.

Zaza Rusadze

Chiatura once set the pulse of the times. With the biggest manganese mine in the world, the city was a motor of the Soviet heavy industry. When Rati Oneli arrives, those days are over. Few things are moving, except for his camera which moves to capture a wide screen shot. Or perhaps there are: the minds and bodies of a music teacher, a miner and two young female athletes who persevere in what has become a ghost town. Oneli combines their portraits in a thrilling atmospheric tale that invokes the Georgian national epic and is enriched by suggestive music, giving a narrative form to his long film debut that at least gets the documentary elements flowing.

Zaza Rusadze

Where is the boundary between documentary observation and staged re-enactment? It may be running right through Chiatura, the former global capital of manganese mining, now sinking into dreariness, perhaps kept together only by the last surviving cable cars. Vakhtang Jajanidze turned places into locations and inhabitants into actors lining up to tell their own stories, which follow a script based on the proverbial “true story”. So the time came when fate wanted to separate two sisters. Lily, a cable car driver, was determined to stay; Tatiana, who was unemployed, had decided to leave …

Zaza Rusadze

Everything becomes blood red, the desert is glowing, the man’s face is burning with effort. He is chained to a stone, determinedly pulling the heavy burden along – until he faints. His subconscious sends even redder images, of a modern war with explosions, rolling tanks and rattling machine guns. Dato Kiknavelidze’s animated short film is in chains, like its protagonist: associative links in symbolic colours from whose end, deliberately or inevitably, dangles the Caucasian War of 2008, weighted with the kind of patriotism that has shaped the national narrative as well as Georgia’s toasts for centuries.

Zaza Rusadze

A girl in an orange robe and a stag are walking through a freezing magic forest. All around them nature is hibernating. The rivers are frozen, the plants have wilted. But where does their path through the icy cold lead? The girl Li.Le begins to look for signs. She discovers clues, wants to interpret, perhaps even follow them. But at first the stag doesn’t like this … In Natia Nikolashvili’s animated fairy tale world hiking is one thing, finding out another. Is Li.Le experiencing a budding spring and a meeting of souls in the mind? Or do these images contain clues leading to reality?

Zaza Rusadze

Nino Gogua takes us on a gender trip. We are being chauffeured by 57-year-old Madona, the only woman driving an urban bus through Tbilisi. Madona has made her way in a “man’s job”, confidently steering her rickety vehicle through the streets and quite frequently to the workshop. In the process, she also drives by the patriarchal assumptions of Georgian society. Nino Gogua follows this strong woman as she explores her feminine side, too. On International Women’s Day, Madona is likely to get no flowers from her colleagues again. That’s why she wants to give herself a present: a new hairdo, for example.

Zaza Rusadze

A film about the church, nation, republic and people and their interrelationships in times of change, constructed completely of archive material found on the Internet by Lea Hartlaub and Soso Dumbadze. Their found footage essay is a chronological reconstruction of Georgia’s recent history – from independence to the present day. The arrangement of the sequences reveals the influence of the Orthodox Christian church, which has been growing continuously in the past decade. As its power increases it reserves the right to actively intervene in social processes. Today priests throw stones at LGBT protesters. Today, deeply religious women want to heal homosexuals with nettles.

Zaza Rusadze

Gela has turned his minibus into a shop. He drives across the Georgian countryside, selling colourful second-hand clothing and shiny plastic household appliance straight out of the boot of his not quite so shiny car. If you ask Gela for the price of his goods, he will quote it in potatoes. For potatoes are worth more than money. Tamta Gabrichidze’s quasi road movie won the Best Short Documentary Award at Hot Docs 2017. Perhaps for its impressive backdrop, those Georgian mountains passing by and the landscapes at their feet. Perhaps for its bizarreness, which seems to go some way towards satisfying the Western desire for exotic far-away places.

Zaza Rusadze

People who go to their house bank for a personal consultation have either too much or too little money. And speaking of “house banks” – that sounds like a special bond, the “financial doctor you trust”. In any case, this special need for consultation arises from disparities: between dreams and income, investment needs and risk forecasts, personal circumstances and objective constraints. This in turn gives rise to a special culture of conversation, one that follows similar rules in Bolivia, Switzerland or Pakistan – that, at least, is the thesis of Sebastian Winkels’ film. And it doesn’t matter into which financial institution in this world we follow him and what language we hear there: superimposed upon each other, the images and soundtracks of the consultations become a sound that the bank customer as a collective subject knows only too well. Oh, the shame about one’s financial impotence! Ah, the confessions one feels constrained to make. And, oh dear, the helplessness with which one must surrender to the rows of numbers.

The camera takes sides – not on a moral level, but on a dramatic one. It is always placed behind the tables where the skilled rejecters and form explainers are sitting, of whom we rarely see more than a sleeve, though. And it faces up to the looks of passing applicants and consultation-seekers like an experienced anthropologist: incorruptible but touchable.

Sylvia Görke

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Nominated for ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness, Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize, DEFA Sponsoring Prize

Salomé Jashi is shooting in the provincial town of Tsalenjikha, following the paths of Dariko, a reporter who covers giant owls, fashion shows and funerals for the local television station. The people who cross the local journalist’s – and indirectly the camera’s – path are mortifyingly anxious about their public image, so much so that one would be tempted to smirk if it wasn’t for the deplorable changing conditions. So the ever present comedy remains subdued, but always close to Georgian everyday life. Because the latter constantly seems to produce “errors connected to ugliness” and could thus have been the model for Aristotle’s definition of comedy.

Zaza Rusadze

It all began with a casting. In 2011, filmmaker Tinatin Gurchiani was looking for young people aged between 15 and 25 who thought their lives were particularly well suited for the cinema. Older people came, and younger ones, too. Everyone was interviewed: about their desires and goals, love and war, positioned against the crumbling plaster of the pale blue wall of a gym. The shot Gurchiani used to present her protagonists is called an “American shot” and is part of the cinematographic folklore of the western movie: a frame which brings out the cowboy’s guns. Or which reveals that the gunslinger doesn’t carry guns at all.

Zaza Rusadze

When the little man loses his home – a suitcase – he jumps straight into a blind man’s pocket and henceforth lives there as his navigator.

Lina Dinkla

The trio of directors, Machaidze, Karumidze and Meskhi, look at Georgian youth. And they look back in a not quite so Georgian fashion. The young people in this poetic film would fit just as well under the Los Angeles sun. The visual parallel becomes a paradox only when you look more closely: riding their skateboards they glide through Soviet ruins, including the random architectural strikes with which the new Georgia is trying to get rid of the old “protector power”. To float in the air, overcome gravity, only for a few seconds! But gravity in Tbilisi seems to be heavier than elsewhere. In the background we hear the cries of Georgian reality …

Zaza Rusadze