Cinema Museum to Screen Award-Winning Georgian Film

TEHRAN – (Iranart)- G eorgia Night Film will be held October 22 at Tehran’s Cinema Museum in collaboration between the Art and Experience Cinematic Group and the Georgian Embassy.

Art and Experience Cinematic Group, affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, has created a platform (in a limited number of cinemas across the country) to show selected non-commercial films to demonstrate the vision and foresight of their creators.

Starting at 6:30 pm, Cinema Museum in Bagh-Ferdows neighborhood will screen ‘Corn Island,’ a drama film created in 2014 by Georgian filmmaker Giorgi Ovashvili, 54, ISNA reported.

The movie was selected as the Georgian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards. The film has won the Crystal Globe prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic.

The screening will be part of a ceremony to be attended by a group of artists, officials from the embassy and representatives from other diplomatic missions in Tehran.

Heroism of Hard Work

Corn Island rewards patient viewers with profundity, says a film review by Variety. The film observes a hardy old peasant and his obedient granddaughter as they carry out one of the world’s most daunting farming traditions.

The setting is a small, almond-shaped sliver of arable land floating midway between the shores of Georgia and its northwestern neighbor Abkhazia. In an austere and slow tradition, the film shows the punishing experience of trying to raise crops in such an impractical location.

Spanning a single harvest season, the film begins with the old man Ylias Salman testing the quality of the soil on so-called Corn Island and ends a year later with another farmer’s arrival. Here, depicted with unsentimental dignity, is the heroism of hard work as practiced by characters so marginal as to have gone unrecorded until now. They are nameless, known primarily by their faces: His is a weathered mask, difficult to read, hers that of a young sylph on the brink of womanhood, more open and expressive.

Every so often, soldiers pass by in small motorboats, and always they stare as if transfixed by her beauty. But most of the time, the girl and her grandfather are alone, left to cultivate this strange no man’s land in peace.

Peace, it turns out, is relatively hard to come by. The island lies in the Inguri River, which forms a natural border between Georgia and the republic of Abkhazia, where secessionists broke away and reclaimed this segment of the country for themselves, brutally driving out the Georgians in the process.

What should be an idyllic existence is often punctuated by the sound of gunfire. And yet, these two unlikely farmers go about their task with unwavering determination.