What is probably the best Georgian movie of the last years has been wining the prize of the "Best Film" in Germany, at the Wiesbaden Go East festival, on april 27th.
Street Days (Kuchis Dqeebi) is the first long feature movie by director Levan Koghuashvili, but it is already a masterpiece, now a recognized one.
On the hard issue of drugs in Georgia's capital Tbilisi, Koghuashvili found a tune which avoids Kitsch, melodrama and empty social realism. The picture of characters involved in the drug-selling and drug-consuming society (which concerns quite a few boys and men in Tbilisi) is realistic but lively, without exageration, treated with poetry and even humour.
The esthetic choices are rigorous and meticulous, with minimalistic takes, often low, close to the ground and thus offering an unusual perspective on streets, which portraits without falling into stereotypes the crumbling, collapsing old town of Tbilisi. A fine photography serves the sujet to its best.
Close entanglement of social relations in Georgia's urban society, poverty, mafia and nepotism are background issues for the plot, but they do not overshadow the personnal stories of the characters. The film avoids thus being suggestive, obviously constructed or purely didactic, which is the risk while dealing with such a topic.
The Go East festival of Wiesbaden, Germany, which has a focus on Eastern European cinema, is the first international consecration for that movie which gives new hopes for a Georgian cinema-scape fallen in a certain apathy since the collapse of the USSR, due mainly to poor means of production and decay of education infrastructures.
If one excepts the films of Gela Babluani, released and produced in France, Koghuashvili's first feature movie fills the gap let by the death of Levan Zakareishvili, director of "Tbilisi-Tbilisi". It promises a new breathe in that country which detains a powerful cinema heritage.
Nicolas Landru
All pictures are taken from the movie's website :
Street Days(http://streetdays.ge/)
Go East (http://www.filmfestival-goeast.de/index.php?article_id=2&clang=1)
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