Award-winning filmmaker Davit Pirtskhalava working on debut feature
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Locarno Film Festival prize-winning young director Davit Pirtskhalava is working on his debut feature A Long Break, with the work set to explore subjects of bullying at school, traumatic memory and revenge.
The filmmaker who earned two prizes at the 2015 edition of the Swiss festival - including Best International Short - for his maiden work Father has now embarked on another debut journey with the feature, produced at the Tbilisi-based Millimeter Film.
Supported by a Georgian National Film Centre production grant, A Long Break will deal with issues of mental and physical abuse among primary school students, a subject familiar to the director via his own youth.
In my school, bullying, abuse and beating were almost the daily norm, as the environment offered us certain conditions and we unconsciously accepted them, with all their ugly and ruthless manifestations", Pirtskhalava told Film New Europe in preview of his new work.
The work-in-progress film is the debut feature for the young director. Photo via Film New Europe.
The experience recently inspired the director to come up with a screenplay for the feature that involves its protagonist convening a reunion, explicitly as a way of reconnecting schoolmates many years after their graduation.
However, Tsitsi has a secret motivation: he wants to punish his former classmate Guga, who used to make life difficult for the entire class at school"- Film New Europe
In his interview with FNE the Georgian filmmaker said he wondered what the reunion would mean if the former victim was to turn the tables and stage a "process similar to a court ruled by the thirst for vengeance".
Involving a cast of Georgian actors, the feature will also benefit from support by the producing studio, however Millimeter Film are also looking to join forces with studios abroad for making it a co-production.
With principal filming set to run in Georgia in the coming summer, Pirtskhalava's debut feature is expected to premiere in early 2021.
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Toronto International Film Festival, a major North American cinema event, will screen A Long Break, the first feature work by Georgian filmmaker Davit Pirtskhalava, in this year's edition opening next month.