Cinema has been at the heart of Georgian culture for over 100 years, reflecting the country’s unique traditions, people and landscape – but also making an important contribution to world cinema. Following the recent extensive season of Georgian films at MoMA and the Berkeley Art Museum in the US entitled “Discovering Georgian Cinema,” we are delighted to present three classic documentaries from Georgia to showcase the rich history of Georgian nonfiction cinema.
These films undoubtedly place themselves in the context of German Kulturfilm: short documentaries that helped to “educate” and to influence public opinion. The films, funded by the Soviet State, are dedicated to encouraging the mechanisation of labour, as well as promoting a culture of exercise and health.
The evening will be presented by the writer Aka Morchiladze, who has written some of the bestselling prose of post-Soviet Georgian literature. He now lives in London as a freelance author, writing essays and columns for numerous Georgian magazines and newspapers. Morchiladze has published more than 30 books since 1994 and has won SABA, the major Georgian literary award for Novel of The Year, five times. Some of his novels have been filmed and staged, including Journey To Karabakh (1992), made into the 2005 film directed by Levan Tutberidze and shown in the BGS Georgian Film festival 2005, and The Village by the same director, being show in this year’s festival.
The lineup:
You Must Reap as You Have Sown (Rasats dastes, imas moimki) – Kote Mikaberidze, Vasil Dolenko, USSR, 1930, 26 mins
Ten Minutes in the Morning (Dilis ati tsuti) - Aleqsandre Jaliashvili, USSR, 1930, 29 mins
Collective Farmers’ Hygiene (Kolmeurnis higiena) - Vakhtang Shvelidze, USSR, 1934, 17 mins
Reso Kiknadze is currently professor for Electroacoustic Music at the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia and rector of the Tbilisi State Conservatoire, and has performed as saxophonist and computer musician all over the world. Composer and coauthor of many projects with dance, visual arts, poetry, theatre and cinema, he studied classical philology at the Tbilisi State University. He played saxophone in the Georgian TV Big Band and the Conservatory Jazz Quintet, performing at various festivals in Tbilisi, Tallin, Vilnius, and elsewhere. Between 1986 and 1990 he studied composition and Georgian traditional music at Tbilisi Consevatory. Since 2000 he has collaborated with TanzOrt Nord, a contemporary dance company in Lübeck. In 2002 he founded ‘Resolution Group’, a free electroacoustic improvisation ensemble.
His son, Giorgi Kidnadze, is a Double bass player living in Hamburg and studied at the Hamburg School of Music.
4th London Georgian Film Festival 1-7 October 2015
contact@lifethroughcinema.com
Described as India’s “tinsel slum”, the Kathputli artist colony in New Delhi is home to over 1,500 families of puppeteers, acrobats, painters and magicians. That is all about to change. When the government sells the land to private developers, traditional life is set to be razed for the city’s first skyscraper.
Where outsiders see the slum’s rancid water and shacks, debut filmmakers Adam Weber and Jimmy Goldblum find stunning colours in death-defying performances. Whether bathed in sunlight or exploding against night skies, magnificent fire-eaters, sleight of hand magicians and glorious puppets radiate beauty in crisp, brilliant detail.
As in-fighting breaks out among colony leaders, spilling out into confrontations with developers and the government, the clock ticks onwards to the bulldozing date. Will the artists’ resolve to preserve their culture and overcome the push for progress?
Gorgeous and inspiring, Tomorrow We Disappear is a splendid tribute to fading artistry and the tenacity of tradition.
Directed by Adam Weber and Jimmy Goldblum
Duration: 85′
Year: 2014
On 10 February 2005 BBC journalist Kate Peyton was murdered in Mogadishu, Somalia. For several days afterwards, her death dominated the international press. But within less than a week Kate Peyton’s name was out of the headlines and almost forgotten; just another tragic victim of the journalistic struggle to report from the world’s battlegrounds.
Kate Peyton’s younger sister Rebecca Peyton will be at the Frontline Club to perform her one-woman show, directed by Martin M Bartelt, which invites us into her post-Kate world: Rebecca’s life goes on, changed forever, but it goes on.
A story about politics, journalists and death, told through the eyes of Rebecca. It features racism, press freedom and human rights, and introduces the new etiquette which consists of discussing death at dinner parties, suffering at soirees and grief at gatherings.
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