3rd Tbilisi Film Festival 2002

One of the best definitions of what a genuine film festival is, or should be, can be found in the forward of the catalogue for the 3rd Tbilisi International Film Festival (3-7 October 2002) penned by the festival director. Gaga Chkheidze: »The Tbilisi film festival serves only one goal: to awaken in the audience an interest for true cinema and to enable participation in discussion with the people who are creative filmmakers today. For us, a film festival is anything but luxury, and it is certainly not at all an ostentatious show. Rather, it is a forum established to talk about the reality seen and perceived by the artist as a thinker.«

        Although a modest 5-day event with 20 films on the program, Tbilisi is gearing nonetheless to become a major festival event on the calendar. The Georgian public can lean on a rich archival tradition: the masterpieces of Nikolai Shengelaya and Siko Dolidze, Mikhail Kalatozishvili (Kalatozov) and Mikhail Chiaureli, Tengiz Abuladze and Revaz Chkheidze, Sergei Paradjanov and Otar Yoseliani, the brothers Eldar and Georgi Shengelaya. After Georgian independence was declared, a civil war and financial woes forced such talented filmmakers as Otar Yoseliani, Nana Djordjadze, and Dito Tsintsadze to work abroad in France and Germany. Tsintsadze’s An Erotic Tale, a German production shot in Berlin, was invited to participate in the festival ­ paired with Georgi Shengelaya’s Georgian Grapes, an earlier Georgian-German production in the Erotic Tales series.

        Tbilisi opened with Renny Bartlett’s Eisenstein (Canada-Germany), a biographical portrait shot in English that skimmed the director’s life and is best appreciated by cinéastes familiar with stations in Eisenstein’s life. Pavel Lungin’s Tycoon (Russia-France-Germany) fictionalizes the rise of the billionaire oligarchs along the same lines as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. Alexei Balabanov’s The War (Russia), about the war in Chechnya and shot in the Caucasus, hit the audience hard when news reached the festival that Sergei Bodrov Jr, one of the lead actors in The War, died in a flash mud-slide in the same moutains depicted in Balabanov’s film.

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