Shalva Kherkheulidze

The residents of a Georgian village bungle their way through war, peace, life and death.

At the end of the 20th century, the son of a distinguished family, Sosiko Cholokashvili, became interested in cinematography, a field unknown to the public. Despite his inexperience, financial difficulties, and disappointment, one of the first enthusiasts of Georgian cinema recorded many shots depicting the appearance and existence of old Tbilisi on tape.

Tadeoz Toroshelidze is the most reknowned wine drinker in the whole area. Once he even won a drinking horn in a competition that has rested in his house ever since.

Instead of going to the front, where he had decided to go after his father’s death, Giga Betaneli ends up at a defence factory in Donbass. His fiancée Nana, who had not received any letters from him, believed he had died. Several years later, Betaneli returned and started working at a metallurgical plant. To his surprise, he discovered that Nana had married his new friend Tamaz. Devastated by the news, Giga realised that nothing could be changed.

In the southern region of Georgia, in ancient Meskheti, a young man, Giorgi Toreli, is appointed as the secretary of the Raikom. He aims at the revival of his native region and for this he begins to fight against bureaucracy, autocracy, corruption, prevailing inertia.

The film tells a strange story, in flashback, about a British Telegraph Company’s engineer named Hughes appearing in a distant Guria village. Falling in love with the beautiful Anna, the Englishman became the enemy of her brother, Bolshevik Nestor. Both Hughes and Nestor were shot dead by Lavrenty Mgeladze, who had once had everything, but later was dispossessed and driven out of the village. The old Anna told that story to a young composer who recorded the music: “My dear homeland, why are you weeping?…”

The film comprises three cinematic novellas: (1) “And They Arrived at the Peasant’s Hut… or the Adventures of Writer Senya in Search of the Hidden Word,” in which writer Senya draws inspiration for his rural novels from his housekeeper Yermolayevna’s tales; (2) “The Song, or How the Great Louarsab Organized a Choir,” where a city visitor attempts to form a choir of centenarian elders in a Georgian mountain village; (3) “What Is Our Life?! or What Is Our Life?!”—during a musical reenactment of pre-Revolutionary France, a drunken actor’s tardiness forces King Louis XIV (also the theater committee chairman) and the cast to improvise the play’s ending.