Of course, Heinz Emigholz is not a Georgian filmmaker. But there are good reasons for showing the first “chapter” of his four-part cycle of films “Streetscapes” here. It’s valuable: as a view from outside and a case study of the orientation and desires of such a foreign look. In 2013, Emigholz accompanied the Düsseldorf-based band Kreidler to Tbilisi, where the musicians recorded parts of their “ABC” album. They used an old film studio lot, one of the last places with a “Soviet look and feel” that had managed to escape the craze for modernisation. Urban architecture unfolds around the studio, in skewed perspectives that maybe only travellers from the West can think of.

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

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

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