★★★★☆
Georgian director Anka Gujabidze’s debut film is a visual treat for lovers of monochrome photography.
Gujabidze’s adaptation of Temo Rekhviashvili’s 2021 semi-autobiographical anthology A Courier’s Tales draws on her background as a professional photographer. Belonging to the still image film genre, the 50-minute film is entirely made up of black and white photos, stitched together. Throughout, Gujabidze makes great use of pacing, at times flipping quickly to create the effect of stop-motion animation, while in other cases allowing certain images to linger on-screen, increasing their impact.
Temo Re follows the titular character and narrator, played by Rekhviashvili himself, a stage actor who, unable to live off a wage of ₾20 ($7) a performance, becomes a delivery driver with a less than perfect moped.
Despite being adapted from a series of short stories, the film largely feels it is a connected narrative taking place over the course of one day.
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Temo Re begins with Temo making deliveries to a myriad of flats spread across Tbilisi, introducing the viewer to Georgia’s capital city and its inhabitants. A second section sees Temo suffer a breakdown on the city’s outskirts, requiring him to seek help from an eccentric mechanic. This leads into the third segment, where Temo takes a job as a rather sad looking lion as part of a local district government’s project to re-open a children’s playground.
It is only in the fourth and final section that the story doesn’t quite keep up the pace, becoming much more abstract as Gujabidze finally shows Temo performing on stage in his actual career before taking to the woods for a dream sequence filled with speculative visual collages.
Despite being made on a shoe-string budget, Temo Re is an impressive film, not least due to Gujabidze’s impressive photography. The sound design, by Gujabidze and Levan Butkhuzi, is also worth a mention, making great use of Tbilisi’s ambient noise to bring the images truly to life. This is all especially notable given that Gujabidze has never had any cinematographic training.
Beyond the aesthetics, the story is a clever and humorous critique of contemporary Georgia, where oligarchs stage their own show of progress for the cameras, hiring actors like Temo in the process, while the majority of the country’s residents are forced to toil for much less. Indeed, it is no coincidence Temo’s mother is shown working abroad in Italy, a common destination for Georgian women to work as caregivers for the elderly in order to send remittances back to their families.
Temo Re premiered at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam where it won the Tiger Short Competition Award and the KNF Award from the Circle of Dutch Film Journalists.
Film details: Temo Re (2025), directed by Anka Gujabidze. It will premiere in the UK on 4 October as part of the London Georgian Film Festival.
