Nino Sardlishvili

Filmmaker Jan Willem van Dam made a film in Georgia, following the Revolution of the Roses in 2003, on the borderline of fiction and documentary. The film is based on 'the life and dreams' of Nini Sardlishvili, a sixteen-year-old Georgian girl. Nini tells about her life and dreams, speaks with two elderly women about past and future and walks among the ruins of a huge, burnt-out Soviet archive. She plays herself in the film, just like the other protagonist, Domestic Intelligence agent Gocha Ovashvili. He travels across the country in response to a remarkable appeal by a Georgian minister (appearing in a newscast), to ask people if they are criminals. During this futile and absurd quest, he meets mainly aged Georgians, including a shepherd and two monks, and admires the scenery.

At a glance, the main characters of the film are usual peasants: they hoe and dig the ground; they are busy with animal husbandry and grow crops. But the feature which makes them different from other villagers is their great love to theatre. In winter and summer, in snow and rain, every day they gather in a damaged building, have rehearsals and stage some new performances. The stage is the main driving force in their life, as long ago they’ve been poisoned with the dust of theatre.

What happens when the imagination puts the mind into the unreal borders of false fear, the world around transforms into prison, and the only way out seems to be an escape to the new imagination, to the visual creation of the mind.