goEast film fest to bring award-winning Georgian productions to Wiesbaden audience

A Tbilisi neighbourhood story, a personal tale of a young transgender woman, and experiences of people watching their lost homes from afar after fleeing a war between Russia and Georgia will represent the Georgian contribution to the goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film next month.

With its customary attention to Georgian cinema, the Wiesbaden-based festival will present four works involving Georgian film professionals and released over the past year at its upcoming edition.

Organisers have selected latest works by award-winning directors Salome Jashi and Rati Tsiteladze, with their shorts The Tower and Prisoner of Society finding their spots in the programme respectively.

The four-minute work by Jashi, awarded last year’s ADAMI Media Prize in Georgia, shows a group of people who had to abandon their homes in the region of Tskhinvali (South Ossetia) as the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia broke out.

See an ADAMI Media Prize profile for ‘The Tower’ by Salome Jashi below:

Now locked out of their home region occupied by the Russian military, the families can still observe their former village from a tower on the Georgian-controlled territory.

Jashi created the short for the platform 080808, which brings together the dramatic stories and experiences of people who lived through the experience of the war.

A winner of the best documentary award of the NDU and Tampere film festivals, Prisoner of Society will bring to the big screen in Wiesbaden the complicated reality of a Georgian transgender woman in the realm of a conservative society and family environment.

Prisoner of Society is an intimate journey into the world and mind of a young transgender woman trapped between personal desire for freedom and traditional expectations of her parents [...]”, said a summary of the short for the Tampere event.

Rotterdam International Film Festival-winning feature End of Season by Azerbaijani filmmaker Elmar Imanov will be screened as a Azerbaijan-Germany-Georgia co-production at the goEast festival.

Also featuring efforts from Georgian director Ioseb Bliadze, who worked on the film as the editor, the work has been summarised as “an intimate family portrait set in contemporary Azerbaijan”.

Bringing its characters forth with “emotional depth”, the 2019 feature places them in a state of transformation when Fidan, the mother and wife in the family, disappears during a beach holiday.

The other feature in the Georgian selection comes from Gigisha Abashidze, who premiered Neighbours at the Montreal World Film Festival last year.

Following a group of people living in a dilapidated yard in Tbilisi, Abashidze’s camera shows them in an antagonistic but humorously constructed scenario as they face an investor offering to buy their homes out for a development project.

The proposal seems good enough for every member of the neighbourhood except Gia, who has already spent money renovating his house in the yard.

The goEast festival will screen around 100 films in its edition, showcasing the new wave of cinema from central and eastern Europe.

The 2019 edition of the event will run between April 10-17.