Cheerless

For a long time, the swamplands on the Georgian Black Sea coast were considered to be a "land of death". In this documentary film Soso Chkhaidze takes an ethnographic look at the history of the Colchis Lowland, or Kolkhida, and creates, in the process, his own poetics of cultivating this so-called "wet planet".

In the land of the Colchis, in western Georgia, people have eternally been plagued by malaria, and yet their superstitious belief in “Ujmuri”, the deity of the swamp, stands in the way of a Soviet modernisation project; namely the draining of the swampland. This silent film, long considered lost in the Soviet archives, was only rediscovered and restored in 2018.