Many new talents and voices to Georgia’s film industry get their start in short films, especially up-and-coming directors. Such short features and documentaries also provide a space for experimentation, exploring themes or styles of cinematography less popular in mainstream film.
Three such shorts from 2024 were recently screened at WineCast 2025 in Mukhrani, Georgia. Read on to discover some of Georgia’s cinematic artists to keep an eye out for.
In the Car (2024)
★★★☆☆
Grigol Janashia’s latest short film explores themes of masculinity and revenge all through the windshield of a car. It is a creative take on the confined bottle movie, with much of the acting coming through body language rather than dialogue.
The film opens with the main character (played by Janashia’s father, Jonia Janashia) waiting for a woman (Eka Demetradze) in a parking garage. The relationship between the two is left vague, but it is clear that they are protective of each other. When the woman says she might have seen ‘him’, we are introduced to the central conflict of the film: the woman has been hurt in some way by another man, and Janashia’s character wants revenge.
In the Car manages to pack a lot into its 15-minute run-time, though it keeps the main instigating event vague. The focus is instead on the harm a self-focused need to regain one’s sense of masculinity can have on others. After all, it isn’t the main character who was harmed, but the woman in his life, who acts as a side character in the whole drama.
Fisherman’s Burden (2024)
★★★★☆
Levan Tskhovrebadze’s take on an acid Western crime thriller is based on a dream he had turned into a screenplay written by fellow director Grigol Janashia.
Fisherman’s Burden opens to a shootout between gangsters near a father (Gela Kachkachishvili) and son (Giorgi Mirinashvili) fishing along a riverbank. In the ensuing confusion, a silver briefcase full of money falls into the river, which the fishermen are quick to grab. The father-son duo spend the rest of the film trying to hide the money from the gangsters as well as local corrupt police, risking their own lives in the process.
Speaking to the audience after the film at WineCast 2025, Tskhovrebadze noted that though he felt his full dream inspiring the film was too surreal to include — in it, the corrupt police kidnapped him and sent him to fight in the Russian invasion of Ukraine — Georgia’s political realities have changed, and anything is now possible. He further emphasised that even without this, the film was meant as a call to action for the underprivileged.
The film, running at 18 minutes, is notable for its colourful and expressive cinematography, as well as its striking soundtrack courtesy of Saba Padiurashvili. It is easy to imagine it as a preview for a full-length feature — maybe one day Tskhovrebadze will create just that.
The Flower by the Road (2024)
★☆☆☆☆
Giorgi Parkosadze produced this short documentary as part of his cinematographic studies in Hungary. Intending to make a film about a donkey, Parkosadze came across a Hungarian girl who had befriended such an animal — she became the focal point of this very slow-moving film.
The film follows brief moments of the girl’s life, as she learns English by drawing animals on a windowpane to falling asleep on the donkey’s back against the setting sun.
Though only 15 minutes, the lingering, minimalistic shots make the film seem never-ending. There is little to underpin the documentary in a narrative sense; any meaning must be gained in an abstract manner. For lovers of artsy, conceptual pieces, Parkosadze’s film could hold some interest — it did in fact win best short film at WineCast 2025; for the rest of us, however, it’s one to skip.
