Trento Film Festival offering Georgian cinema in anniversary focus section

Georgian cinema is at the forefront of the 68th edition of Trento Film Festival, where a retrospective of films from the country are screened to viewers and the award-winning documentary A Tunnel is in main competition.

The Italian festival opened on Wednesday and is hosting the anniversary tenth issue of its Destination section, which this year brings 13 films mostly by Georgian directors ranging from Soviet-era classics to most recent releases.

Involving Italian premieres of The Harvest by Misho Antadze, The Tower by Salome Jashi and I Didn’t Cross The Border, The Border Crossed Me by Toma Chagelishvili, the section is also debuting the 2018 work In the Land of Wolves by Grace McKenzie and Our Blood is Wine by Emily Railsback.

Works on social issues - such as Mari Gulbiani's Before Father Gets Back and Rati Oneli's City of the Sun - are in the Destination selection that also brings features from the past century. Author and director Goderdzi Chokheli's 1981 short Mekvle is in the programme along with the 1964 The White Caravan by Eldar Shengelaia and Tamaz Meliava.

[Georgia is] known for its impressive mountain ranges and snow-capped peaks, for its ancient wine-growing culture and for a traditional heritage of polyphonic songs recognised as intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO."

If we add to this a rich and solid cinematographic history, the connection with the Trento Film Festival is so evident that Georgia is the perfect host country to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 'Destination…' section," a summary for the selection by the festival said.

The full selection for 'Destination...Georgia' can be viewed on the festival's official website.

Beside the focus programme, Georgian cinema is represented in the main competition section by A Tunnel, a feature documentary by Nino Orjonikidze and Vano Arsenishvili that earned the directors the award for Best Film by First or Second-Time Director at the MakeDox Creative Documentary Film Festival this week.

For the two filmmakers the North Macedonian prize followed the principal prize of the Montenegrin-based UnderhillFest documentary festival, awarded to the feature in June.

Trento Film Festival will run through September 2.