The Cinematheque

“Glurdjidze has made an uncompromising debut, but she has also made an exquisitely beautiful visual poem that bodes well for the continuing rude health of Georgian cinema.”

Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter

Abkhazia, in Georgia’s far northwest, was once an autonomous region within Soviet Georgia. Simmering ethnic tensions between the Abkhaz, the area’s original inhabitants, and Georgians, the largest ethnic group at that time, led to war in 1992. Georgia lost control over most of Abkhazia, and roughly 250,000 Georgians were forced to flee their homes. House of Others, Rusudan Glurjidze’s semi-autobiographical first feature, is set in an abandoned village in the aftermath of war as an Abkhazian family is being relocated to a Georgian home. But real peace is hard to come by. ​“An exquisite, evocative, and elusive tale of abandonment and the psychological scars of war … Glurjidze’s formal boldness yields an effect that is subtle, strange, and silvery … Thematically, and sometimes visually too, it recalls Bergman or Tarkovsky, but it is also its own quiet thing.” Spanish cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu won an ASC Spotlight Award for his work here.

In Georgian and Russian with English subtitles

East of West Award
Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2016

preceded by

12 K. Marx Street
მარქსის ქუჩა 12
Georgia 2020
Irine Jordania
15 min. DCP

In the disputed region of South Ossetia, Russian forces have maintained an occupation since the beginning of the 2008 war. Many thousands of Georgians have been displaced. In 12 K. Marx Street, one of them sits down at a breakfast table every day and dials the same number, without answer.

In Georgian with English subtitles

Followed by a Zoom Q&A with Rusudan Glurjidze