SECTION: EcoEast

33FFC Sektions Button ECOEAST How do people change the landscape and how does the landscape change people? How does Eastern Europe deal with climate change? What are the interactions between nature and people, between ecology and economy? How are we changing our own habitats? EcoEast presents films about nature and the destruction of nature and threatened living environments, between forestry and open-cast mining. Observations without a moralising finger, but all the more sustainable for it.

A Tunnel

GWIRABI

Nino Orjonikidze/ Vano Arsenishvili
GE/DE / 2019 / 90 min

A sleepy train station somewhere in the middle of Georgia. The “Belt and Road Initiative” is to pass through here in the not-too-distant future. Hundreds of Chinese workers soon settle in the remote valley in order to, quite literally, move ...

Kolkhida

KOLCHIDA

Soso Chkhaidze
SU (GE) / 1967 / 20 min

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 ...

Cheerless

Ujmuri

Nutsa Gogoberidze
GE / 1934 / 58 min

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 ...

Big Green Valley

Didi mtswane weli

Merab Kokotschaschwili
SU (GE) / 1967 / 92 min

A cinematic meditation on nature: shepherd Sosana (Dodo Abashidze) lives in a remote valley far from the Soviet ideals of collectivization and progress. The current balance between man, wildlife and the surrounding countryside can no longer be ...

Taming The Garden

MOTWINIEREBA

Salomé Jaschi
CH/GE/DE / 2021 / 90 min

The subtropical landscape of western Georgia is suddenly shrouded in a milky-white mist. The coordinate system of the scene is abruptly disturbed when a century-old tree in the sea cuts across the horizon. The ambitious project of an oligarch turns ...

No Body And The Blue Sky

ARA WIN DA LURJI TSA

Magda Gvelesiani/ Leah Peirce
DE/GE / 2021 / 36 min

The river as a place that is social, poetic, and also one of resistance. This student film project follows the course of the Bzhuzhi River in Guria and creates a space that combines childhood memories with ecological and cultural issues.

The Harvest

MOSAWALI

Misho Antadze
GE/US / 2019 / 70 min

Georgia is the world's third largest exporter of bitcoins. A gigantic electronic infrastructure is required for the production of the digital currency. In this way, regions such as the idyllic wine-growing region of Kakheti have become landscapes in ...