Short film
არა, მეგობარო!
Giorgi Mgeladze · 1993
Synopsis
Tbilisi, in the early nineties. Levan wants to leave the country. Light-heartedly, he says goodbye to everyday things: he takes his neighbours' daughter to school, goes back once more to the cemetery, walks through a city where people shoot without aiming at anyone. Then everything turns out differently from what he had planned.
Context
It is its author's graduation film, and he also wrote the screenplay; the cinematography is by Dato Tchikhladze, the music by David Evgenidze, and the whole runs twenty-eight minutes in black and white. Levan Abachidze played the lead: he was killed before the film was finished, and its author made the first and last shots the same images. Nutsa Kukhianidze, who was nine, makes her debut in it and would later be the actress in a Georgian film shown at Cannes.
Who it is for
A twenty-eight-minute short film, in Georgian, with limited distribution. It is worth knowing that the country was then emerging from a civil war and two separatist conflicts.
Prizes and reception
Grand Prize and Prize of the Protestant Jury at the Oberhausen short film festival in 1993, and a prize at the Molodist festival in Kyiv the same year.