Filmmaker Tamta Gabrichidze and Rusudan Chumbadze, director of the Tbilisi Wine Museum, are the co-founders of the WineCast Festival (20-24 August), an event that merges cinema and wine. Their shared vision was to create a meeting point between two emblematic traditions: cinema and Georgian wine. Cineuropa spoke with them about the origins, challenges and future ambitions of the festival.

Cineuropa: How did the idea for the festival come about?
Tamta Gabrichidze: We are both co-founders of the festival. I’m a filmmaker, and Rusudan is the director of the Tbilisi Wine Museum. We’ve been close friends since childhood and also run a production company together. At one point, we decided to unite our passions, to build a friendship between cinema and wine, and that’s how the festival was born. The first edition was like a pilot, but we immediately found strong partners, such as the American Film Showcase, the US diplomacy programme, which sent us experts and helped us shape the project. Last year was the starting point; this year is our second edition.

What differences did you notice between the first and second editions?
TG: This year, the festival grew significantly, with more films, more guests and more visibility.

How do you build the programme?
TG: We research, contact producers and, of course, have an open call on FilmFreeway – this year, we received over 1,000 submissions from around the world. We have three sections: shorts (fiction, documentary, animation), feature films, and a special category on wine and culinary themes. For wine-related films, we also collaborate with the Most Festival in Spain and rely on international colleagues to recommend titles.

What about the wine side of the festival?
Rusudan Chumbadze: I take care of the wine programme, together with our champion sommelier Mr Shelley. We limit participation to 30 wineries to ensure quality and avoid overwhelming the audience. We also have competitions with categories such as red, amber, classic and dessert wines. This year, we had 86 wines competing. The wine programme includes tastings, master classes and awards.

And what’s your vision for the future?
TG: Each year, we want to grow more and more international. Last year, we only featured Georgian wineries; this year, we welcomed participants from the USA, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy and Germany. On the film side, we continue to host international competitions, but this year, we chose to focus the feature-film section on Georgian cinema, to support our industry and give audiences access to films still circulating at festivals and not yet online or in cinemas.

What are the challenges for the Georgian wine industry?
RC: The past decade has seen a rapid transformation, with a huge leap in quality. After Russia closed its market, Georgian producers had to push for exports to Europe, the USA and Asia. This became a motivation to improve and internationalise our wines.

How do you promote the festival?
TG: Last year, we hosted five international guests, mainly from the USA. This year, we welcomed more international professionals, including journalists and bloggers. Domestically, we collaborate with major media partners across television, the internet and magazines in order to spread the word.