Vajiko Chachkhiani

Kaleidoscopic omnibus film with 11 documentaries about Georgian political prisoners: from animation and archive work to letters from the heroes and podcast with their friends.

Chachkhiani's film is centered around a generational relationship between Giorgi, a perpetrator of domestic abuse, and his mother. The latter finds herself in a position of having to make a decision of either covering for Giorgi after he abuses his wife, or siding with the survivor of the attack.

Winter which was not there’ can be seen as a metaphor for the liberation of an individual from his or her own history. In the film, a man watches a monumental concrete sculpture of a man being hoisted out of the sea. The sculpture is clearly reminiscent of a classic heroic monument but in a strange, and somewhat uncanny way, the face and figure of the sculpture look amazingly like the man who’s watching it rise out of the sea.

Grandmother while watching the performance, she first time gets into the dialogue with herself, before the moment she did not have time. After entering the dialogue with herself, it is a dangerous dialogue as psychologically it will form a some kind of a conflict. The conflict might expose outside or might stay inside in the interior. During the circus performance grandmother goes through the rite of passage.

A hot summer day in Tbilisi. The market is still closed, and the only living presence is the local dogs. With the break of day, truckloads of watermelons arrive, people begin to bustle, farmers haggle. Soon, a new shopping centre will take over this place — a building set to erase the life that still lingers here. As we follow people setting off into their day, through the shifting landscape and the call of mythical sirens, our gaze settles on a single fruit vendor who finds himself in a confrontation between life and death. One life equals one village — or perhaps, the entire country?