Shanghai film fest to debut Dito Tsintsadze’s latest feature, screen Tinatin Kajrishvili’s Berlinale-premiered work

The international premiere of director Dito Tsintsadze’s latest work Inhale-Exhale will come at this month’s Shanghai International Festival, with another work of the filmmaker and fellow director Tinatin Kajrishvili to be screened at the event.

Debuting in the competition at the major regional festival, the film is Tsintsadze’s first work in two decades shot solely in Georgia, and follows a story by acclaimed Georgian author Nestan (Nene) Kvikinadze.

In the screenplay, Irina, a former doctor, returns home following a long prison sentence, only to find herself having to regain the trust of those around her, to start a new life.

Beside the basis of a work by celebrated author, the film also benefits from input from Rusudan Glurjidze, an award-winning director working as producer on Tsintsadze’s premiering work.

Featuring actor Salome Demuria, known to cinema enthusiasts from Glurjidze’s acclaimed feature House of Others, Inhale-Exhale will screen in Shanghai on June 22.

The Chinese festival will also host a screening of Shindisi, another work by Tsintsadze, in the Belt and Road Film Week section, with the dramatised feature following events of the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.

In the script, the nearly-deserted village of Shindisi in the region of Tskhinvali (South Ossetia), the flashpoint of the five-day conflict, is shown with protagonists amidst a shaky ceasefire between Russian and Georgian troops.

Russian military violates the peace agreement and ambushes the Georgian army near the village. At the cost of their own lives, those who have remained try to hide the Georgian soldiers wounded in an unequal struggle — Shanghai International Film Festival.

A still from ‘Inhale-Exhale’. Image: Cinetech Film Production.

In the same section, Tinatin Kajrishvili will have Horizon, her 2018 Berlin International Film Festival-premiered work, screened for the Shanghai audience.

Its protagonist retires to a remote village following a painful breakup but cannot form connections with a small local community through his ongoing anguish.

A routine marriage-breakdown story blossoms into something deeper, a timeless meditation on the destructive power of love and the hushed poetry of grief — The Hollywood Reporter.

Kajrishvili’s feature also drew praise from Variety, with the cinema platform lauding the director who “once again proves herself a canny observer of intimate relationships and their fracture points” via the film.

The Shanghai International Festival will run between June 15-24.