December 17, 2014, 4:30 p.m. — Tbilisi, Tbilisi (2005)

Tbilisi, Tbilisi

2005. Georgia. Directed by Levan Zakareishvili. With Giorgi Maskharashvili, Eka Nijaradze, Rusiko Kobiashvili. The multi-award-winning Tbilisi, Tbilisi—which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight after six years in the making—was Zakareishvili’s final film before his premature death at 53. The film casts an unforgiving eye on the Georgian capital during the tumultuous early years of independence, when corruption and poverty reigned. To Dado, a discontented young filmmaker working on a screenplay that, little by little, meshes with the narrative of Tbilisi, Tbilisi in grainy black and white inserts, the whole city seems to have turned into a marketplace where professors sell household goods, police are bribed by petty thieves, and orphans and displaced people from Georgia’s separatist wars live dangerously on the streets. The film’s intensely personal tone and barely suppressed anger is a powerful indictment of the powers that uphold this politically and socially untenable situation. In Georgian; English subtitles. 88 min.