Chase
2025 · 27m · Georgia
Directed by Niniko Lekishvili
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A well-known Georgian actor and TV host steps off the theater stage and into the streets as a leading voice of the country's growing resistance movement.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise looks like a straightforward activist doc, which would bore me—except Lekishvili's asking a genuinely weird question: what happens when performance *becomes* resistance, when a public figure steps off one stage only to discover they're on another? That's the subversive move everyone will miss.
This sits in a rigorous documentary tradition of witnessing political transformation through a single subject, reminiscent of Nanook or Grey Gardens in its commitment to observing the threshold between public persona and private conviction—a film that understands the weight of its own formal choices in representing a nation's turning point.
The decision to follow an *actor* into resistance is the coup here; Lekishvili trusts that we'll read the irony and sincerity simultaneously in his face without ever having to underline it, and that economy of gesture—letting the performer's own awareness of performance do the work—transforms what could've been a standard political portrait into something more penetrating.