Visions du Reel festival set to premiere documentary by Shorena Tevzadze

Filmmaker Shorena Tevzadze’s documentary Didube, the Last Stop will bring the story of a shop keeper working at a bustling train station in Tbilisi to tens of thousands of viewers attending the Visions du Reel film festival in Switzerland next week.

The 2017 production will have its world premiere at the highly regarded event also set to host over 100 filmmakers and over a thousand industry professionals in Nyon starting April 21.

Tevzadze’s Georgian-Swiss co-production will be screened on April 27 and 28 at two different venues of the festival and will be followed with a discussion involving the filmmaker.

The feature follows daily life of Niko, a 65-year old owner of a veterinarian pharmacy and shop in the middle of the crammed Didube train and bus station in the Georgian capital.

Time stands still here, and it really is the Georgia of today that we find in this snapshot of the nonetheless incessant activity at the station.”

The passers-by [...] circulate between the buses and the market stalls, as if uncertain about the future the country has in store for them. The Didube terminal will only be a stop before going elsewhere,” said the festival’s preview of the film.

A still from 'Didube, the Last Stop'. Photo: Didube, the Last Stop film Facebook page.

Didube, the Last Stop was showcased at the Nyon festival as work-in-progress film production in 2015 and 2016.

The film is also scheduled to have its Georgian premiere at the CineDOC-Tbilisi International Documentary Film Festival in Tbilisi next month.

Founded in 1969, Visions du Reel was the first European festival to dedicate itself to raising awareness on cinema from then-Soviet states.

The Visions du Reel festival will open in Nyon next week. Photo: Visions du Reel.

Filmmakers from Georgia have appeared at the festival in recent years, with juries of the 2016 edition of the event awarding the Best New Film prize to director Salome Jashi’s documentary The Dazzling Light of Sunset.

The full program of Visions du Reel can be viewed here.

The festival will run through April 29.