As Georgia moves through a politically tense period, cinema remains one of the country’s clearest artistic languages. Over recent decades, Georgian directors secured a place in European co-productions and regularly reached top-tier festivals, but after 2022 the industry’s internal climate grew more difficult: following a leadership change at the National Film Center, critics said loyal figures were installed, and public funding, in their view, has increasingly been used to pressure unwelcome filmmakers.
Against that backdrop, critic Vladimir Kocharyan turns to five films that reflect both the country’s history and its present contradictions. In Rusudan Glurjidze’s “House of Others,” a family displaced by war settles in an abandoned Georgian home in an Abkhaz village. The film depicts not only armed conflict, but also the condition of people pushed out of ordinary life and left in a gray zone between past and future.
Salome Jashi’s documentary “Taming the Garden” follows the transport of giant trees for the private garden of Bidzina Ivanishvili. The director observes how the project of the country’s richest man reshapes roads, landscapes, and the lives of rural residents, for whom selling a tree is often a matter of survival.
In Elene Naveriani’s “Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry,” the life of Etero, a 48-year-old village shop owner, changes after a secret romance. The story becomes an account of resistance to a patriarchal norm that condemns a woman both for living alone and for trying to choose her own form of intimacy and freedom.
“Street Days” by Levan Koguashvili takes viewers to early-2000s Tbilisi, where addiction, poverty, crime, and broken social ties form a portrait of a lost post-Soviet male generation. In Levan Akin’s “Crossing,” shown in Berlin in 2024, an older woman named Lia travels from Batumi to Istanbul in search of her niece Tekla, who was cast out by her family because of her trans identity. The journey becomes a story of guilt, hope, and a rift between generations.
The shared thread across these films is a Georgia where war, inequality, conservatism, and concentrated power are not abstract background but lived personal experience. That is why, despite censorship risks and political pressure, Georgian auteur cinema continues to speak directly about what is happening to the country.