Chiatura
2021 · 16m · France, Georgia
Directed by Toby Andris
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
After her husband dies in an accident at the manganese mine in the Georgian town of Chiatura, cable car operator Eliso wages a personal war against the mining company and her city by shutting down the cable car system.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to read this as political allegory—mining company as oppressor, cable cars as symbol—but Andris sidesteps the sermon entirely; what's radical is how quietly Eliso dismantles the machinery without declaring war, letting the Soviet architecture do the arguing for her.
Chiatura understands that place itself is a formal problem: Andris shoots the decaying cable car system not as backdrop but as the film's actual syntax, where every cut between the engineering and Eliso's face becomes an argument about infrastructure and grief that sits firmly in the lineage of landscape-as-witness cinema.
The masterstroke is the sound design during the shutdown sequence—Andris lets the ambient industrial noise gradually thin to near-silence rather than scoring the moment, and that single choice transforms a quiet act of sabotage into something almost unbearably intimate on a shoe-string budget.
Festivals
- Slamdance Film Festival 2022
- Festival de Trouville - Off Courts 2022, Prix du jury France - Region Normandie
- Krakow Film Festival 2022
- Raindance Film Festival 2022
- Palm Springs ShortFest 2022
- Edinburgh Short Film Festival 2022
- TOKO Film Festival 2023, Best Short Film and Best Screenplay