Café Besitzer
In the Georgian riverside town of Kutaisi, summertime romance and World Cup fever are in the air. After a pair of chance encounters, pharmacist Lisa and soccer player Giorgi find their plans for a date undone when they both awaken magically transformed with no way to recognize each other.
The story of the first love between two eighth-graders.
Mustafa
After learning that his daughter is in love with a truck driver, corrupt Housing Office director tries to make use of his service in a last smuggle operation, then break his promise and marry her to someone else. This comedy is mainly about the dark sides of the Soviet bureucracy.
The way home for Aleksandr Rekhviashvili is not charted in the conventional sense. It takes the viewer along some peculiar roads and across a unique landscape: Georgian history and legend, politics and social stratification, religion and ethics. Allusive, stylized and allegorical from beginning to end, his long-banned The Way Home is in part a tribute to Rekhviashvili’s favorite director, Pasolini, especially to The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966). Together with the short film Nutsa (1971) and the widely acclaimed Georgian Chronicle of the 19th Century (1979; SFIFF 1983), The Way Home closes a triptych of films that represent Rekhviashvili’s poetic contemplation of Georgia’s past. It makes extensive use of poems by Bella Akhmadulina (the major female poet of the cultural ‘thaw’ of the ’50s and ’60s and a Georgian by descent), and of sets by Amir Kakabadze. Like other films in the trilogy, The Way Home is stunningly photographed in black-and-white.--Oxymoron
Burnuta
A graduate of a sewing school arrives in a Kakhetian village. Insisting on opening a fashion house there, the energetic and good-natured Makvala makes the life of the villagers much more lively.
Relatives of the beautiful Mardjan consider Elberd unworthy of her hand. Father, uncle and grandmother keep the girl locked up. And for protection they use a whole pack of dogs. But the cunning Elberd manages to lure the dogs into large baskets, hang them high on the branches of trees, and take his beloved out of the house.
Murad, a Muslim guy brought up in the noisy yard of Tbilisi, falls in love with a Belorussian girl Anya, who lives in the same neighborhood, though Anya is impervious to Murad’s feelings.
