06/02/2026 - Ana Urushadze’s second feature is an oneiric, subtly mystical story about identity told from the point of view of a famous actor who re-examines his role in his own life

Georgian filmmaker Ana Urushadze is returning nine years after her multi-award-winning debut, Scary Mother [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ana Urushadze
film profile], with Supporting Role [+see also:
trailer
film profile] which has just world-premiered in IFFR’s Tiger Competition. She brings her own personal brand of subtle magical realism to this existential story about a once-famous actor who re-examines his life following an unexpected offer of a new role.

We find 59-year-old Niaz (Dato Bakhtadze, who broke through in Hollywood with Crash and was most recently seen in Extraction 2) in a state of bewilderment in reaction to a young female filmmaker wanting to cast him in a small role in her “weird” debut film, as he describes it. He’s supposed to play a character who literally sheds his skin like a snake, and who dies at the end. Niaz, who has played heroic leads all his life, doesn’t straight out refuse but it’s obvious he doesn’t believe in the young director at all, not least because she’s a woman. But he takes the storyboard and asks for three days to decide.

With a total running time of 140 minutes, Niaz spends the remainder of the film roaming the often-rainy streets of Tbilisi, being recognised and praised by regular people, and meeting his old friends and colleagues, including his estranged wives and one former lover who is now disfigured after falling out of a window. She’s also part of the young director’s cast. He then starts recognising scenes in the film’s storyboard as things that are also happening to him in real life, like meeting two mysterious Armenians who seem to know his days are numbered (which they don’t share with him), after burying his dead parrot. But whose days are actually coming to an end, and is this ending literal or metaphorical?

Bakhtadze is basically in every shot and, with his bulky frame, thinning long hair and overcoat, he walks with an increasingly defeated posture and a lost look in his eyes. Niaz’s health also seems to be deteriorating, and he appears to slowly recognise, through a dream-like daze, that, despite his popularity, his life has also been typecast, that his identity as a real person is just another role and that those closest to him have suffered because of it.

There are numerous odd episodes and various quirky and sometimes creepy details in this oneiric film, but Urushadze’s vision is rock-solid and her directing confident. Estonian DoP Rein Kotov films Tbilisi exteriors and interiors with a limited palette of browns, yellows and ochres, which easily reminds us of sepia, the hue of old films, filled with lives (or roles, a word Niaz hates) long gone. The catchy, jazzy score by Sten Sheripov - another key crew member from Estonia - is playful and moves between upbeat, slightly suspenseful and dark registers, reflecting the tragicomic nature of Niaz’s character.

The story of Supporting Role may prove elusive for some audiences, but its themes of identity, our perceptions of ourselves, the world and other people around us, and how seriously we take it all, are easily relatable. It’s a rare film that’s equally open to interpretation yet very direct in its message.

Supporting Role is a co-production between Zazafilms (Georgia), Allfilm (Estonia), Enkeny Films (Georgia), Zeyno Film (Turkey), Cinetrain (Switzerland) and Melograno Films (USA).