Dea Kulumbegashvili in San Sebastian Film Festival programme with debut feature 'Beginning'

Award-winning film director Dea Kulumbegashvili will make her feature debut with the world premiere of Beginning at the San Sebastian Film Festival later this year.

The filmmaker's work has been unveiled as part of the Spanish festival's official selection alongside Summer of 85 from acclaimed director François Ozon and Another Round from Thomas Vinterberg.

Kulumbegashvili will see her feature screen at the event following its selection for this year's Festival de Cannes, which eventually did not go live due to the ongoing concerns with COVID-19. The Georgian has also had her short works picked for past festivals at Cannes and the parallel Directors' Fortnight.

In Beginning, her lens captures an experience of harassment by a Jehovah's witness and her family in a remote town in Georgia, where both the police and an extremist group subject them to violence.

Yana [...] is in shock after angry locals burn down her place of worship during a service. Her husband David manages to obtain CCTV footage of the attack [...] [but] in the remote Georgian village where they are living with their young son, his search for justice triggers a chain of events that will find the family totally isolated and entirely at the mercy of the hostile local police," a synopsis for the film reads.

The director told Cineuropa she wanted "audiences to identify with this unsettling condition where experiences cannot be simply classified as true or false" with her work. Kulumbegashvili wrote the screenplay alongside director Rati Oneli.

The film features Ia Sukhitashvili, Oneli and Kakha Kintsurashvili as protagonists, with editing by Matthieu Taponier and a score composed by internationally acclaimed producer Nicolas Jaar. The film is produced by First Picture, Zadig Films and O.F.A.

Supported by the Georgian National Film Center, the Georgian-French co-production has also seen support by the Residence of the Cannes Cinéfondation, the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab in Jerusalem, Sofia Meetings and Sarajevo’s CineLink, as well as the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund.

Beginning will screen at the 68th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival, set to run between September 18-26.