Leading Swiss fest to showcase Georgian shorts in Country Focus

A diverse selection of Georgian cinema, from Soviet-era films with subtle subversive tones to newest works on social and human issues, is set to screen at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur festival in Switzerland’s north next month.

Promoted as “Switzerland’s most significant short film festival”, the week-long event will highlight Georgia’s film legacy and emerging talent through its Country in Focus programme.

It will come with three sub-sections themed on different subjects: Recording Georgia will represent “a manifesto for the independence of younger generations” within the context of personal, social and political subjects in Georgia over the recent decades.

Director Bakar Cherkezishvili’s 2017 work ‘Apollo Javakheti’ will screen in Recording Georgia:

Seven films were selected by organisers for this segment, from Salome Jashi’s portrait of a settlement for internally displaced persons in A Swim (2012) to Prisoner of Society, a 2018 short on a transgender woman’s experience in the realm of conservative social beliefs in Georgia.

Tsiteladze’s film, named Best Documentary of the Tampere Film Festival and nominated for a European Film Academy prize, will also screen in the international competition of the Swiss festival.

In Impressions of Home, four fiction shorts produced between 2014-2018 and focusing on “contemporary youth and family relationships in urban and rural Georgia”.

The section will screen Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Lethe, praised as “an extraordinary film that in a manner is not only unforgettable but also adds a step forward in cinema" at the Thessaloniki International Short Film Festival.

Filmmaker Ioseb Bliadze’s lens follow a father and daughter in a poverty-stricken community in Three Steps, awarded at Berlin International Short Film Festival, among its other prizes.

A still from Otar Iosseliani’s 1962 work ‘April’. Photo: monsieurcocosse.blogspot.com.

Elene Naveriani’s 2014 The Gospel of Anasyrma and Father by Davit Pirtskhalava will bring their own storylines to the section.

Finally, in Georgian Rebels, three Soviet-era productions by acclaimed directors Otar Iosseliani, Giorgi Shengelaia and Mikheil Kobakhidze will be introduced to viewers at the festival.

Shengelaia’s Alaverdoba (1962) sees a reporter travel to Georgia’s winemaking and sunlit province of Kakheti to witness a folk festival of harvest.

A winner of two awards at the 1967 Krakow Film Festival, Umbrella by Kobakhidze shows a romantic life of a railway signaller and his date until an umbrella arrives into their idyl out of nowhere one day.

Produced in 1962 but only released a decade later due to political censors, Iosseliani’s April follows a young couple after their move from a poor district to a wealthier environment, where their relationship is increasingly worsened.

The 11 films of the Focus Country programme will screen in Winterthur between November 6-11.