EurasiaNet Civil Society - Georgia: Director's Detective Film Promises New Life for a Sleeping Industry

CIVIL SOCIETY

GEORGIA: DIRECTOR’S DETECTIVE FILM PROMISES NEW LIFE FOR A SLEEPING INDUSTRY
5/16/08

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 � milder. Something between irony and cynicism took hold."

The Georgian economy plummeted, and drugs were everywhere. In extremis, Tsintsadze found that he had to relocate to keep working. After long hesitation, he picked up and left for Germany. It was a wrenching choice, and one he says he might never have made if not for a vision of an angel that came to him one night.

Like much of Tsintsadze’s work, "Murder" his latest feature combines the ordinary with the extraordinary. "In literature, I love the detective story," he recounts. "It’s interesting until the end, but when the end comes I forget immediately. Every ending is kind of banal, unless it goes to another dimension -- like Franz Kafka’s stories, which begin like detective stories and turn into a completely other world."

That same freedom can be seen in the storyline for "Murder," in which a man, stabbed with a bicycle spoke, is found hours later in a theater on the other side of town from the place where he was mortally wounded. The story is told from the respective points of view of the four major suspects onscreen before the culprit is finally revealed.

"Murder," is aimed at a European and North American art house market, as well as a domestic Georgia audience. The actors are international (Ewen Bremner from "Trainspotting" plays the murder victim) and the script combines snippets of English, Russian, Georgian, and German.

With a budget of $2 million, it’s a large-scale venture for the cash-poor Georgian cinema, but still a modest venture by the scale of American indie productions, many of which are prestige offshoots of the larger studio system.

Guka Recheulishvili, the 28-year-old head of the film’s main production company, Sanguko, says that his team plans to premiere the new film in Venice this September. The co-producer is the German company Tatfilm.

Tsintsadze has traditionally fared well on the international festival circuit, taking the gold at San Sebastian for his German-language feature, "Schussangst" (Gun-shy), in 2003. Hollywood made him a subsequent offer, but after he read the script he turned on his heel and bolted.

"In Hollywood, it’s black and white. There’s no in-between," Tsintsadze declares. "I love colors. I want to find in the bad guys good things, and I want to find in the good guys bad things. We are all human. Sometimes we are bad and ugly, and sometimes we are full of dignity."

His award-winning 2006 feature, "The Man from the Embassy," was a prime illustration of the Tsintsadze principle of ambiguity in action. The tale of an unsympathetic German petty bureaucrat with a white-collar embassy job who takes in a dirty Georgian street girl, it has a devious moral complexity beneath a laconic surface. Though the affair ends with the German leaving his job on suspicion of pedophilia, the director sees it as a tale of two people who learn to be human through an unconventional Platonic attachment.

Tsintsadze says: "It’s a story about creation; he’s creating her with love and tenderness, and she’s creating him. She’s gotten some experience that makes her human. Of course, she’s going back to this aggressive surrounding, but she’s gotten something which I hope will survive."

Lasha Bakradze, the Georgian film critic, historian and writer, was one of the people to whom Tsintsadze turned to get his bearings when he first arrived in Germany.

"You know, others had bad experiences too, but to make something out of those experiences, you must be very thoughtful," Bakradze says. "So many things happened in Georgia at this time, and the life on the streets was so interesting, you can make many interesting films, but many people are coming out with absolutely uninteresting stories."

Though others bemoan the fact that many of Georgia’s leading directors now live and work abroad in European countries, like France, Germany or Russia, Bakradze is more sanguine. If "ten or 20 individuals" make and market their films outside Georgia, "it’s no problem," he says.

"We are in a globalized time," Bakradze reflects. "There’s no wall anymore between East and West, and we know what is going on in the world. It’s much better because [directors] have this chance to bring in something new from the outside."

Editor�s Note: Pamela Renner is a Fulbright scholar in arts journalism, living in Tbilisi.

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