Filmmaker Keko Chelidze working on first feature fiction 'No More'

Filmmaker Keko Chelidze is working on her first feature fiction work No More, with the film set to portray a musician in Tbilisi facing a multitude of life choices while facing terminal illness.

The director, whose feature documentary Dead Souls' Vacation premiered at the Hot Docs festival in Canada earlier this year, is in an early stage of production with the new project after pitching it for the first time at the Budapest Debut Film Forum earlier this month.

No More follows Lexo, a musical artist moving from countryside to the Georgian capital Tbilisi while having to keep his grave illness in mind. Taking up the daily life of a street musician, he is pursuing the dream of saving up for a trip to Russia to meet his father there for the first time.

[The protagonist] falls in love with a documentary filmmaker who is making a film about him, while his best friend finds a way to participate in a Canadian music festival and wants Lexo to join him."

Lexo has little time left so he has to choose between his love interest, finding his father or doing what he loves best, playing in a band with his best friend." - Film New Europe

Chelidze told Film New Europe she had conceived the idea for the fiction work while working on a documentary about two musical artists.

[W]ith my co-writer Kote Kalandadze, we decided to write a fiction film script about their friendship and the characters’ parallel, personal dramas, and through them, a society which breeds confused, poorly raised and reckless men," the director told the cinema platform.

Produced by Kote Kalandadze and Elene Margvelashvili through Parachute Films, the feature project has benefited from production grants and support from its producing studio as well as the Georgian National Film Centre and Terra Incognita Films.

Chelidze plans to begin principal shooting in the spring of next year.