Film Archive

House of Others

East of the West - Competition 2016 / Skhvisi sakhli / Georgia, Russia, Spain, Croatia 2016

They managed to survive the war and, as winners, they are assigned houses that were swiftly abandoned by others. In their fresh environment filled with old memories and unfamiliar objects they’re about to start a new, contented life. But it soon becomes clear that the hardest battle is yet to be won. A quasi-autobiographical debut from an extraordinarily talented Georgian director.

Synopsis

It’s the beginning of the 1990s and Georgia is immersed in a civil war with the newly emerging state of Abkhazia. Those who managed to escape and now find themselves on the winning side are assigned houses previously occupied by the enemy. In the strange environment of other people’s homes, with lingering memories of the horrors experienced by the original occupants, many of these new arrivals try to start afresh. But there’s no sign of the contentment they had envisaged in their new surroundings; their old demons have come back to torment them. The director’s own harrowing experiences, faithfully conveyed onscreen twenty years later, are rendered into a tale of rootlessness, where the loss of identity, of childhood and of the very meaning of life cannot negate the protagonists’ awareness that life itself must still go on. This war picture devoid of battle scenes heightens the ineffability of the evil that accompanies armed conflict. At the same time, the debut film is a supremely auteurist work whose visual qualities hold their ground with those of Tarkovsky and Zvyagintsev, confirming the unprecedented rise of Georgian cinema.

Kamila Dolotina

About the film

103 min / Color, DCP
World premiere
Director Rusudan Glurjidze / Screenplay David Chubinishvili, Rusudan Glurjidze / Dir. of Photography Gorka Gómez Andreu / Music Dusan Maksimovsky, Alexey Vorobyov / Editor Grigol Palavandishvili, Dmitri Chistyakov, Levan Koukhashvili / Art Director Grigol Mikeladze / Producer Zurab Magalashvili, Nadezhda Gorshkova, Katerina Gecmen-Waldeck / Production Cinetech Film Production / Coproduction Liga Production, Kinoscopik, SARKE Group, Embrio / Cast Zurab Magalashvili, Olga Dykhovichnaya, Ia Sukhitashvili, Salome Demuria, Ekaterine Japaridze, Branko Djurich, Alexander Khundadze / Sales Tato Film

About the director

Rusudan Glurjidze (b. 1972, Tbilisi) took a course in Romance languages and literature in Tbilisi. She then studied screenwriting and direction under Giorgi Shengelaia at the Georgian State Film and Theater Institute (1990–96). After the breakup of the Soviet Union, which essentially took the film industry down with it, she made a living making commercials and video clips. She worked as 1st AD on G. Shengelaia’s comedy The Train Went on and on (Midioda matarebeli). Since 2007 she has also worked as a producer for the Cinetech production company. She presented her debut feature project House of Others (2016), in which she shares her own experiences of war, at the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Regional Forum in 2013, and the effort she put into perfecting the film since that time is clear from every take.