It’s the beginning of the 1990s and Georgia is immersed in a civil war with the newly emerging state of Abkhazia. Those who managed to escape and now find themselves on the winning side are assigned houses previously occupied by the enemy. In the strange environment of other people’s homes, with lingering memories of the horrors experienced by the original occupants, many of these new arrivals try to start afresh. But there’s no sign of the contentment they had envisaged in their new surroundings; their old demons have come back to torment them. The director’s own harrowing experiences, faithfully conveyed onscreen twenty years later, are rendered into a tale of rootlessness, where the loss of identity, of childhood and of the very meaning of life cannot negate the protagonists’ awareness that life itself must still go on. This war picture devoid of battle scenes heightens the ineffability of the evil that accompanies armed conflict. At the same time, the debut film is a supremely auteurist work whose visual qualities hold their ground with those of Tarkovsky and Zvyagintsev, confirming the unprecedented rise of Georgian cinema. Kamila Dolotina.
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