Listen to the Silence

April is released from prison after having been busted as an illegal sex worker. In the basement of a luxury hotel in Tbilisi where she works, she meets Dije, a young man who has left his native country Nigeria behind. Believing he is on his way to Georgia in the United States, he finds himself in a country that offers him no future. April herself is hiding and coming to terms with a lost love that is better not spoken of in Georgian society. Between longing and survival, in the searing heat of the capital, an extraordinary relationship develops between these two people who live on the margins of society.

Abastumani is a tuberculosis hospital high up in the Georgian mountains where the old Soviet doctors used to be well respected professionals, but as times changed they got stuck in the past and became mere minders for ex-convicts, alcoholics and drug addicts dying of TB. There is many other staff in the hospital, but there is no security. The patients who are predominantly male, greatly outnumber the staff and so the rules of the hospital are dictated by them.