In Levan Koguashvili’s Guria, the Soviet Union may have collapsed, but not everyone got the message. His black-and-white film, shown in Venezia Spotlight at Venice and recently selected as Georgia’s Oscar submission (see the news), shows a world that’s still catching up. It’s stuck as deeply in its old ways as the mud is deep on its roads. It might be the 1990s anywhere else, but you wouldn’t know it from looking around.

Guria is one of those stories about “nothing”: small conflicts and small problems that, in the end, amount to a great deal. One of the biggest issues is a sale gone wrong – grumpy widower Zuriko (Kakhaber Tcholadze) must sell his hazelnuts but refuses the initial offer. It criminally undervalues his stash. After all, “Nine in ten nuts are good,” he tells his best buddy.

This leads to absolute mayhem, as they’re soon shot at and end up on an operating table – where they’re still trying to close the deal. Zuriko can’t even focus on a possible new love interest, unceremoniously dumped at his home to pluck chickens while he’s on the road. “Now is not the time to get married,” he says. “I couldn’t sell my hazelnuts!”

These are the best parts, which feel like Tortilla Flat in Western Georgia. Koguashvili – rewarded at Tribeca for Brighton 4th – has an eye for the absurd, no doubt about that, and clearly loves a small community where everyone knows each other and has no tolerance for bullshit. Options are generally limited, and there are goats and pigs everywhere. But people keep on dreaming.

It’s fun, but not every joke lands. There’s really no way to make light of bride kidnapping, even though everyone comes away from that experience in relatively high spirits. Still, Koguashvili seems to enjoy the moments when the laughter suddenly stops and gives way to real pain or unease.

He also manages to create something deserving of praise: an entire universe with its own rules and logic – or lack thereof. Here, if you’re crowned Miss Guria, you get a food processor as a prize – the instruction manual is included. If you’re in school, they’ll teach you how to hold a grenade. If you give a gravedigger a photo to print on a tombstone, he’ll lose it. And then you’ll only have a photo of the grave to remember your loved ones by.

Another issue is that, despite its charms, Guria is overlong. The desire to celebrate, one assumes, real-life people and their traditions is commendable, but some of these scenes go on forever. It could benefit from maintaining the dynamic pace of the first half because now, it’s a trip that requires some commitment. Then again, a local old-timer could easily say: “What’s the hurry? Just lie back, enjoy the cigarettes you stole from teenagers and roll around in the black sand. It’s good for rheumatism.”

Guria is a Georgian-Swiss-Luxembourgish-Bulgarian-Turkish-Norwegian-Saudi co-production staged by Kino Iberica, Cineworx Filmproduktion, Tarantula Luxembourg, Art Fest, TatoFilm, Maya Film, Staer and the Red Sea Fund. Loco Films handles international sales.