It’s dark and I’m watching my breath dance in January’s cold air. I’m sitting on the stone steps outside South London’s Asylum Chapel, watching people with flushed cheeks exchange smiles and hellos and go on in through a large open door. Inside, the chapel hall glows warmly with twinkling candlelight and cups steaming with hot…
Girls Will Be Girls, Shuchi Talati’s sharply observed debut feature, begins both literally and figuratively on a mountaintop. Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) is the first girl to become head prefect at her elite, co-educational boarding school in an unnamed town in the Himalayan foothills of Northern India. Mira embodies the focus and diligence of a straightlaced…
Crossing, the fourth feature film from Swedish-Georgian director and screenwriter Levan Akin, is at its heart an immersive quest for connection and catharsis. The film opens in Batumi, the port city on the Black Sea coast of Georgia where retired schoolteacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) begins a journey to Istanbul accompanied by Achi (Lucas Kankava), a…
In the opening minutes of Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, the third feature film from director Elene Naveriani, we meet Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), an austere store owner in a remote village in Georgia, picking blackberries in the wild. She is about to bite into a blackberry when she sees a blackbird. While she is admiring the bird,…