Georgia: Director's Detective Film Promises New Life for a Sleeping Industry

Georgian cinema celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, and at its vanguard is a director with a penchant for the unexpected.

On a cold midnight shoot this past January for his new detective fantasia, "Murder," Georgian film director Dito Tsintsadze roams about a Tbilisi café, with cast, crew and friends looking on. He is a thin man on the edge of sleepless overdrive; grey-haired, gaunt, emotional and uncompromising.

He has lost five kilograms on the set, pulling his whole company into marathon sessions too many nights in a row. It was the only way to make a full-length feature in less than three months.

The atmosphere is electric.

"They sometimes work 14-16 hours a day, my crew," says Tsintsadze. "We did it in 40 days, with three days left. For Georgian reality, that's heroism, from all of the team -- working day and night. Nobody is complaining."

Perhaps the reason no one complains is collective joy in seeing film crews working in Tbilisi once again. After a hiatus of close to 15 years, the Georgian cinema is fitfully coming back to life, with a generation of expatriate Georgian directors like Tsintsadze (who has lived in Germany since the mid-1990s) taking the lead.

Five years ago, Georgian cinema seemed stone-dead. Today, three or four features are in the works for next year. A generation of expatriate auteurs -- of whom Tsintsadze is one of the most accomplished -- is piloting new films into the European art-house circuit.

The youthful Gela Babluani, who directed "13 Tzameti" on a miniscule budget from France, may be Georgian cinema's best-known wunderkind abroad, but Tsintsadze is its conscience and its rudder. And also perhaps its libido -- bringing an overt eroticism into a cinema previously ruled by moralistic conventions.

At 51, Tsintsadze is old enough to have learned his craft from two living masters of Soviet-era Georgian cinema -- Otar Iosseliani and Eldar Shengalaia-- and young enough to have seen their world crumble in the 1990s, a decade he says brought catastrophe to Georgia. "I lived here at that time, and to be honest if you ask how I survived, I can't tell you, because I can't remember. This period I try to forget."

In its wake, Tsintsadze reflects, "a cynicism which we did not have before" emerged. He corrects himself: "Cynicism is not the word; irony is