24/11/2025 - A father and son get to know one another on the eve of various tragedies in George Ovashvili’s fifth feature film

George Ovashvili’s fifth feature film, The Moon Is a Father of Mine, which is premiering in competition in Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival, might serve as a prime example of the use and slight subversiveness of the “Chekhov’s gun” principle in dramaturgy. The principle dictates that, if the firearm is displayed in the first act, it must go off and set up a plot twist in the third. In the present film, the rifle is presented more elaborately at the very end of the introduction before enjoying two additional moments in the limelight in the hunting sequence which takes up most of the second act, and with the firing of the rifle opening the film’s final act.

Grade school student Toma (newcomer Giorgi Gigauri) is living with his grandma Sidonia (Kira Andronikashvili) in a town apartment in the autumn of 1991, while his mother is living and working away in Moscow. Toma has a knack of getting into trouble, especially when he decides to stand up to a group of bullies who are targeting him for having revealed his feelings to his classmate Anana. Tired of scolding him for his behaviour, the grandmother accepts the boy’s father Nemo (seasoned actor Givi Chugaushvili) taking care of Toma in his ancestral village in the mountains.

Once in the mountains, the father and son begin to get to know each other better. Toma learns that his father was imprisoned for killing a poacher while working as a ranger, and Nemo tries to pass on some wisdom to his son. But as soon as they start to trust each other implicitly, destiny separates them again.

The trouble is that, in Ovashvili’s movie, the third act seems a little anti-climactic and therefore not particularly purposeful, but that’s only one of the film’s issues. The magic realism introduced by the filmmaker at a given point never gets a firm foothold since it clashes with the social realist air established in the opening sequence. Slightly wooden acting and declamatory deliveries of stilted or falsely poetic dialogue, over-use of the shallow focus trick in Christos Karamanis’ cinematography, which only occasionally opens up onto the unique, breath-taking and eerie mountainous landscape, and Josef Bardanashvili and Jakub Kudlác’s unnerving, strings-heavy score which becomes omnipresent, regardless of what’s going on onscreen, also hamper the film. Eventually, the sluggish pace established in the editing phase by Kim Sun-min serves as a painful reminder that this could have made for a good short film rather than a pretentious, uneventful feature-length movie.

In fact, all these afore-mentioned “mandatory art house elements” seem to have been frivolously added to the mix in order to draw attention from selection committees and juries, rather than representing any kind of auteur vision. We also get the impression that, with The Moon Is a Father of Mine, Ovashvili is trying hard to regain the status he enjoyed after his first two feature films, The Other Bank [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2009) and Corn Island [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: George Ovashvili
film profile] (2014). It’s possible that there’s more to it, but ultimately the movie is written in a coded language only accessible to certain viewers. In this sense, the opening card informing us that we’re about to watch a true story, and the closing explanation that these events were followed by the Georgian Civil War, feel more like an attempt to wrap things up than a loose metaphor on freedom and self-sufficiency, the necessity of patriotism, or the importance of family roots.

The Moon Is a Father of Mine is a co-production between Wagonnet Films (Georgia), Joli Rideau Media (Luxembourg), Seven Peas Film (Turkey), 42film (Germany), Axman Production (Czech Republic) and Waterfront (Bulgaria) in association with ZDF/Arte.