Largest retrospective of Georgian film opens at US museum

Moviegoers across the United States are being given the unique opportunity to reflect on the rich history of Georgian cinema.

Georgia’s rich film traditions will be presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City today. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive joined forces with the MoMA’s Department of Film to present the exhibition, which was touted as the largest-ever retrospective of Georgian cinema in the US.

"Throughout the turbulent history of the last century, Georgian cinema has been an important wellspring for national identity, a celebration of the spirit, resilience and humour of the Georgian people,” the Museum website read.

Georgia’s Prime Minister, who was currently in the US to attend the United Nation’s General Assembly special session, was scheduled to visit the museum and deliver a speech after watching one of the Georgian films later tonight.

The exhibition saw staff from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive work for the past 20 years to bring together 45 programs that portrayed the vibrant history of Georgian film production from 1907 to 2014.

The exhibition traced the development of Georgian cinema from classics of the silent era, to great achievements of the early sound and Soviet era, through the flourishing 1980s and the post-Soviet period to today.

"These filmmakers, working across a broad range of styles and thematic concerns, have created everything from anti-bureaucratic satires of the Soviet system, to philosophical studies rooted in a humanist tradition, to lyrical, poetic depictions of the region’s spectacular landscape,” MoMA website read.

Several days before the exhibition opened, American film critic James Lewis Hoberman published a review of Georgia’s rich film tradition titled "Independent Nation with Films to Match” in leading American media outlet The New York Times.

"Georgian cinema is exotic and, like the mountainous terrain celebrated by the Russian writers Lermontov and Tolstoy, can be forbidding as well as fiercely beautiful,” he wrote.

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