Cinema
ისინი
Levan Zakareishvili · 1992
Synopsis
May 1975, a tower-block district in Tbilisi. Gia, Kostia, Temo and Noukri are eighteen and are growing up at the foot of the same buildings. Gia is violent and lives alone with his mother, Temo is gentle and plays the guitar, Noukri comes from a well-off family. What they will make of those years already sets them apart.
Context
The film came out in 1992, in a Georgia that had entered civil war and where production had almost ground to a halt, and yet it sets its action in May 1975. This gap between the year of release and the year of the action is what audiences first took away: the generation that was twenty under Brezhnev recognised itself in it at the very moment its world was vanishing. The screenplay was written with Gia Badridze and the production comes from the Giorgi studio of the national studio; the social parable borrows the forms of the crime film. Zaza Koleishvili leads the cast.
Who it is for
In Georgian, with no French release. It helps to know that the title does not refer to anyone in particular: it is a pronoun, and it stands for a whole age group.
Prizes and reception
Shown in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 1992, the film is regarded in Georgia as one of the cult titles about youth in the late Soviet period.