Power Trip

Filmmaker Emily Railsback and award-winning sommelier Jeremy Quinn provide intimate access to rural family life in the Republic of Georgia as they explore the rebirth of 8,000-year-old wine-making traditions almost lost during the period of Soviet rule.

After 14 years in prison, the time has come for Gogita to return to his normal life. His wishes seem modest enough: a home of his own and then marriage to a nice woman. But who would be interested in a poor farmer and ex-con who still lives with his mother? Then he meets Maka on the internet. She's not that young anymore, and she's not the prettiest girl in the world, but she can bake delicious cakes. They're soon making grand plans without even having met.

A traveling trader provides a window into rural life in the Republic of Georgia, where potatoes are currency and ambition is crushed by poverty.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many in Russia's DIY punk scene fled to Tbilisi, Georgia. Mobilization only exacerbated that trend. This documentary follows the stories of some of those punks but also explores the complicated socio-economic effects they have on the city. The film is about the potential for punk and other similar subcultures to make connections even across otherwise tense political borders.

A documentary film "Angels of Sorrow", dedicated to the 80th Jubilee of a contemporary Georgian classic composer - Giya Kancheli is filmed during the concert tour in several cities of the world (Berlin, Brussels, Antwerp, Baku, Tbilisi). He is an artist, for whom the most important thing in all time was freedom. During Soviet period, he was accused of introducing morphine with his music and that he rejoiced enemies in capitalist countries with it. Giya Kancheli with his friends replied to all these from theater stage, where they reflected the whole absurdity of the Soviet Union. The war is still going on - Art can't change anything.

Stalin’s statue in the garden of a nunnery provokes discussion – plenty of it – in a small Georgian village. Some of the locals used to know Stalin personally because he visited the village several times when he was young, and they continue to see him as a benign ruler from the good old days rather than the brutal dictator he was. Whenever an episode of purge shook the Soviet Union’s republics, they hid the statue in the woods. The church also plays an important role in people’s lives. All in all, the film reveals a fundamental conflict in Georgian society.

War in Abkhazia, 1992. An Estonian man Ivo has stayed behind to harvest his crops of tangerines. In a bloody conflict at his door, a wounded man is left behind, and Ivo is forced to take him in.

A passionate coming-of-age tale set amidst the conservative confines of modern Tbilisi, the film follows Merab, a competitive dancer who is thrown off balance by the arrival of Irakli, a fellow male dancer with a rebellious streak.

Following an order of the landowner, the bride of Arsena’s fellow villager gets kidnapped and the bride’s father is relentlessly flogged. Arsena tries to rescue the woman but fails and goes to the mountains with his newly married wife. Above all, Arsena learns that his wife is impregnated by the landowner and burns down his house. Arsena gets arrested, but manages to escape and joins the rebel peasants. Arsena feels that with the passage of time the rebels turn into criminals and continues to fight with the oppressors alone.