Dasatskisi (Beginning) directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili (Georgia , 2020)
Winner of best full-length movie at this year’s Trieste Film Festival, ‘Beginning’ has also been shown, and widely acclaimed, at many other festivals including New York, Toronto (where it premiered in September 2020), and Adelaide.
The praise is merited. There are not enough female directors and fewer still prepared to take the risks Kulumbegashvili does. This is her debut feature film but it already shows her to be a woman who combines originality and courage in her filmmaking style. In one interview she says “plot is for structure, the rest is cinema”, “this film is about looking” and “the more action there is on screen, the more passive the viewer is”.
‘Beginning’ is essentially a character study of an alienated woman Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili ) who is married to David (Rati Oneli), a Jehovah’s Witness leader, and who has a young son Giorgi (Saba Gogichaishvili).
The movie is powerful but not without flaws. At 2 hours and ten minutes, it is a good 20 minutes too long. In the final sections there is a shift of focus to the religious indoctrination of children and we briefly follow the husband’s life. These are superfluous distractions from Yana’s story. Continue reading
This film was presented on day two of this years Trieste Film Festival of Central and Eastern European cinema. It is set in 1957 and follows the fortunes a handsome young Frenchman Pierre Durand (Anton Rival) after moving from Paris to Moscow for an internship. He is studying literature but is also there to resolve a family mystery. His background means that he is fluent in French and Russian. Director Andrej Smirnov says “I decided to show this moment through a foreigner’s eyes [someone] who would have an objective look at our reality.” 
This strange and melancholy film , presented on the opening day of the 2021 Trieste Film Festival, is a road movie about love and death.
