Grzeli nateli dgeebi

Tbilisi, Georgia, 1992: The Soviet era is over and Georgia must fend for itself. Civil war is raging in the province of Abkhazia. For Natia and Eka, the barely fourteen-year-old protagonists of Grzeli nateli dgeebi, childhood is coming to an end. Eka is growing up without her father, rebelling against her concerned mother and her older sister. And Natia’s father, a choleric alcoholic, terrorises the entire family. The two friends cannot find peace outside of the family either – not in school, not on the street, and not in the bread lines. Chaos, insecurity, and fear of what the future might bring hold sway in everyday life. An admirer gives Natia a pistol with one single bullet. A little later, she’s abducted by another admirer.
This first feature film by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß takes up the buried traditions of Georgian cinema, weaving together loud and soft, melancholy and missing love, eruptions of violence and a sense of the idyllic, precocious cold-bloodedness and childlike naïveté into a wonderfully rhythmic, exciting cinematic composition. A new generation of filmmakers has emerged in Georgia and is starting out by remembering its own history.