The 9th London Georgian Film Festival: Vision and diversity amidst political hostility

In the view of most independent commentators, Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party is heading to govern in full authoritarian mode and continuing to undermine European democratic values. As civil society is under attack, independent Georgian filmmakers are attempting to navigate the system or look elsewhere to make the films they believe in.

Georgian filmmakers have a strong tradition of being outspoken against the authorities — and the festival opens with a film that was banned for 50 years.

My Grandmother (Chemi Bebia, 1929), a Georgian tour‐de‐force from the Soviet Eccentric Cinema  Movement, is one of the most innovative and visually exciting silent films ever made. This satire on bureaucracy and bourgeois values, noted for its avant garde anarchic styles, unspools the foibles and follies that abound when the hero, an homage to American silent comic Harold Lloyd, loses his job as a paper pusher.

The internationally celebrated Swedish-born Georgian director Levan Akin, is a contemporary, powerful and outspoken voice, and the 9th edition of the festival will screen both his films And Then We Danced (2019) and Crossing (2024). Both films deal with queer characters ostracised by traditional Georgian values and current society norms.

And Then We Danced explores a fledgling gay relationship within the macho world of a traditional Georgian dance company. It garnered much hostility, and even death threats, during its making, and having received a 15-minute standing ovation in Cannes, experienced highly confrontational protests at its opening in Tbilisi. In turn, at the heart of Crossing is a transgender character who has been cast aside by her Georgian family and village. In a remarkably moving story set in Istanbul, her aunt goes to try and find her. Levan Akin will be in  London for his Q&A.

Another outspoken director and scriptwriter included in the 2025 festival is Dito Tsintsadze. His classic 2000 black comedy Lost Killers, set in the red light district of Mannheim, was first screened in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section at Cannes. Tsintsadze moved to  Berlin in the 1990s, and has since made over a dozen films in Germany and Georgia.

Also showing this year is the classic 1929 film Applause directed by the renowned Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian who was born in Tbilisi in 1897.  There will be a special projection of the 35mm print of this pre-code American drama and musical, notable for Mamoulian’s innovative sound and camera techniques in early talkies.

The festival welcomes a new generation of Georgian filmmakers who have had international success, and they will be here to present their films with Q&As.

Tiku Kobiashvili’s Inner Blooming Springs (2025), selected for this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, is an intimate portrait of young Georgian friends facing the beginnings of the Tbilisi protests. Anka Gujabidze’s remarkable debut Temo Re (2025), won a prestigious Tiger Short Award and the  KNF (Circle of Dutch Film Journalists) Award at this year’s Rotterdam Festival. Elena Mikaberidze’s touching debut feature documentary Blueberry Dreams (2024) has its London Premiere. Tato Kotetishvili’s debut feature Holy Electricity (2024), winner of the Golden Leopard Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival 2024, has its UK Premiere.

This year, as part of the 9th London Georgian Film Festival, Life Through Cinema, in collaboration with the Georgian Film Institute (GFI), will hold an intensive five-day film workshop entitled Cinema Of Displacement: On A Home Called Sakartvelo. This hands-on workshop led by filmmaker and writer Nana  Ekvtimishvili (In Bloom 2013, My Happy Family 2017) and actor Marika Khundadze (A Room Of  My Own, 2022), will look at home, displacement, and belonging through the language of cinema. Participants will build a short one to five-minute film which will be screened in Ciné Lumière during the festival.

The closing film is the UK Premiere of Imago (2025),  directed by Déni Oumar Pitsaev, who will be in London for his Q&A. It was the first Chechen feature-length film to be screened at the Cannes International Film Festival, winning the top non-fiction prize the L’Œil d’or (Golden Eye), and the critics’ French Touch prize. Imago was filmed in the hauntingly beautiful Pankisi Valley in eastern  Georgia, and this mesmerising and poetic documentary grapples with the weight of Pitsaev’s personal journey, including his family’s displacement, the traumas of war, and confronting the expectations and confinements of a traditional community.

The festival will also hear from new directorial voices showing five short films by emerging Georgian talents.

This will be the fourth consecutive year that the London  Georgian Film Festival will be presented by London’s leading arthouse cinema Ciné Lumière.