3.5/5 ★
Elene Naveriani’s latest film is a beautiful story of finding and embracing your true desires in the most unexpected ways.
The third feature film from Georgian director Elene Naveriani, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, is a quietly radical and profoundly tender love story. Premiering at Cannes in 2023 and enjoying a rich and successful festival run thereafter, the film adapts the acclaimed 2020 novel of the same name by Georgian writer and feminist activist Tamta Melashvili.
The film follows Etero (Eka Chavleishvili) — a 48-year-old woman living alone in a small provincial town in western Georgia. Unmarried and childfree, she is often pitied by the women around her, who see her as a lonely spinster. But Etero feels no need for pity. Having endured a difficult childhood, she has crafted a life of her own: she owns a modest beauty supply shop, a small house, and finds joy in the quiet rituals of her independence — taking long walks, picking wild blackberries, making preserves for winter, and treating herself to cake in a nearby town, all without worrying about her body image.
For Etero, freedom tastes sweeter than domestic servitude. As Naveriani describes her, Etero is an ‘instinctive feminist’, bold and outspoken. She is resisting society’s deeply entrenched patriarchal norms simply by living life on her own terms, its own act of radical resistance.
The film opens with Etero picking her favourite blackberries when her gaze catches a blackbird. In that fleeting moment of connection with the bird, she loses her footing and falls into a steep ravine near the River Rioni. As her life flashes before her eyes, she crawls back to safety — bloodied, shaken, and filled with a raw, newfound desire to truly live.
The first act of her awakening is impulsive, even scandalous by the standards of her town: a passionate sexual encounter in the storage room of her shop with Murman (Temiko Chichinadze), a flirtatious delivery man whose charm is as ordinary as it is disarming.
‘There you go, 48 years of virginity’, Etero tells herself while sitting on the cold floor of a storage room with a stranger’s head on her knees. What begins as physical release quietly blossoms into something more intimate and unexpected — a tender, infrequent love affair that reshapes Etero from within.
Agnesh Pakozdi’s cinematography captures this transformation in subtle strokes. Etero does not suddenly change her appearance — she still wears the same muted clothes, her expressions remain restrained, but she is glowing. Her gaze lingers. During the rare dates and the moments of freedom with Murman she softens. Chavleishvili’s performance is understated and masterful, revealing volumes with the smallest of gestures: a blurred glance, a hesitant smile.
Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry is a love story, but not the kind we’re used to seeing on screen. It does not romanticise youth or glamorise passion. Instead, it explores a mature, unvarnished affection that grows quietly between two people who are neither fashionable nor idealised. Their connection is tender, vulnerable, and refreshingly unpretentious. The film’s bittersweet finale is an unexpected yet logical continuation of Etero’s story.
Melashvili’s novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that resists easy adaptation. Yet Naveriani successfully ‘translates’ these thoughts and emotions to the screen without losing their introspective poetry. While the secondary characters lack depth and sometimes veer into stereotypes, the strength of Chavleishvili’s and Chichinadze’s performances carries the film.
Grounded in subtle performances and striking visuals of western Georgia, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry is a refreshingly honest portrait of a woman in the autumn of her life who dares to live for herself.
Film details: Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (2023) directed by Elene Naveriani. Available to watch on Prime Video, BFI, Curzon Home Cinema, and Apple TV+.
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