Tornike Bziava’s short ‘Fishing’ claims independent cinema award

Fishing, a short by film director Tornike Bziava, has been revealed among winners of the Monkey Bread Tree Film Awards, with the prize for the auteur work following earlier awards from Georgian and foreign festivals over the past few years.

The Georgian-French co-production was distinguished with the Best Short Film under the $10,000 budget prize in the main competition, with festival director Ben Rider offering praise for the filmmaker’s direction.

[The opening of the film] shows off the most [...] as there is a sense of orchestration with timing, and a general sort of choreography of the cinema within this singular space.”

[T]he filmmaker seems quite adept to being in touch with cinematic tools. That’s why it is, after all, a winner. This is cinema finely presented!,” Rider noted in his impressions of the winning entry.

Bziava has said his aim with the short was to “give the spectators a sense of naturalism, showing how beautiful moments of everyday life could be destroyed by reasons totally external, related to corruption.”

Whereas the tagline for Fishing sums the plotline as “The Christmas Holidays are over and people in town start to do fishing”, the auteur director has expanded more on shared subjects his cinematic works, namely reflections on social and political reality in post-Soviet Georgia.

Fishing follows three works Bziava has addressed the themes with, namely Wake Man (2015), Nest (2011) and April Chill (2010), with the latter shown at screenings centred around Georgian cinema in Warsaw and Tbilisi over the past few years.

Wake Man, winner of the Best Short Film Award at the 2015 Tbilisi International Film Festival, was also selected for the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France, where judges awarded Fishing the Research Award Special Mention last year.

Bziava’s latest work also emerged with the Short Film Competition Jury Award from the 2017 edition of the Tbilisi festival and was among nominees at Brest European Short Film Festival and the Villeurbanne Short Film Festival in 2018.

Juliene Feret worked as co-producer for Fishing alongside the director, with Arseni Khachaturan contributing his cinematographic talents.

Born in Tbilisi, Bziava graduated from the Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgia State University before studying at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

The Monkey Bread Tree Film Awards are promoted as organised “by filmmakers for filmmakers” and looking to contribute to independent cinema production and promotion, with prizes given out on a seasonal basis.