The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“[As] in Tarkovsky’s films, conspicuous anachronisms and highly symbolic spaces imply that this is not just a chronicle of 19th-century Georgia … Chronicle will be familiar to any reader of Kafka, whom Soviet conservatives have long considered decadent.”

Karen Rosenberg, Index on Censorship

Sometime in the second half of the 19th century, Niko, a young student from St. Petersburg, returns to his native village in Georgia. From there, he travels to the district capital to confront the local officials of the Tsarist administration with a demand that the village’s forest lands, where they have buried their dead, be protected from the designs of foreign industrialists. In a Kafkaesque process, he learns that the fate of the forest and his village may depend on the signature of a single official. Little-known outside of Georgia, Rekhviashvili completed only four narrative features, all made between 1979 and 1989. He limns his historical parable of lonely but determined resistance at a gentle pace, in a minimalist, visually poetic style that reinforces the contrast between country and city.

In Georgian with English subtitles

preceded by

Colophon
Germany 2015
Alexandre Koberidze
20 min. DCP

A young man, a gorgeous summer day, a barge slowly floating down the river, and a story involving a beautiful, strangely reluctant young female passenger who cries geometric tears. This student film is an early take on the sorts of magical shifts and fairy-tale conceits that captivated viewers of What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?.

In English

Video introduction by Alexandre Koberidze, a friend and mentee of the late Rekhviashvili