Seven years in the making, The Kartli Kingdom [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Tamar Kalandadze et Julien…
fiche film] is the stunning debut feature by Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel, who co-directed, shot and edited the film as a testament to the exiled Georgians who have made a home out of an abandoned Tbilisi sanatorium. The duo spoke to Cineuropa in the lead-up to their film’s world premiere at IDFA, where it went on to win the Best Director Award in the International Competition (see the news).

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Cineuropa: How would you describe the historical continuity between the place (the Kartli sanatorium) and the country’s past, as exemplified in your film’s title?
Tamar Kalandadze: Kartli is the historical name of the Georgian kingdom, the etymology of which relates to what we Georgians call our country today. If we’re talking history, the film speaks to the Soviet times, which are more recent than that. Kartli as a place was built in 1976 as a luxurious sanatorium on the lakeside of Tbilisi, before it was repurposed in 1987 to treat people with heart conditions. In 1992, the regional and civil war broke out, so the Abkhazian region, which during Soviet times had an autonomous status, was still backed up by the Russians. As you know, they are very keen to kindle regional conflicts in areas they have an interest in. As a result, 300,000 ethnic Georgians were exiled with nowhere to go; they started to occupy state-owned buildings like sanatoriums, nurseries and schools. The building in our film reflects a lot of what happened during the wars, as it was transformed architecturally and functionally.

Julien Pebrel: There’s a book called The Chronicle of Georgia, and each chapter is written by a different author throughout the centuries – all important narratives in the country’s history from medieval times up to the Georgian Civil War – so we hope to add a new chapter, the “Chronicle of Kartli”.

You shot the film over seven years, and during that time, it may seem like nothing has changed for the inhabitants and their lives, but also, everything has shifted in the world around them. Do you see The Kartli Kingdom as a document of a particular time and place, which may not exist for much longer?
JP: When we started filming, there was no dispute about the inhabitants of Kartli being relocated. The finished film starts with that, but that wasn’t true for the actual chronology of the shooting process in 2018. Back then, we didn’t have the notion of having to document a key moment before the building disappeared – we just wanted to document the life of the people whom we quickly came to love. We were also taken with the strange magic of that place, not to romanticise it in any way.

TK: We may have had a feeling deep down that the film would become a documentation of something that wouldn’t exist, at least not in the same physical form as it does now. A sentiment perhaps, yes. To return to your previous question, perhaps we knew that the film would be in some way related to the community’s life, similar to how the Chronicle of Kartli book is related to the country. That felt encouraging, and we were honoured to be a part of it.

What about the importance of including archives? Not only people's archives of their weddings and their special days, but also, you make your own archives with a different kind of aesthetic. I'm curious about the other devices that you use, including the pinhole camera.
TK: As we were plunging ourselves into the layers of the Kartli complex, we discovered that its past had a solid emotional layer of wartime memories and all of these dreams about what would come after. There are memories, there’s the present moment and there are those hopes for the future, all coexisting there. We wanted the film to reflect that layering and to be true to the different lives people live there. We didn't want to film people so that we could make “clean” images that would be too beautiful. Julien made a pinhole camera without any lenses, which gave us this blurry image that reminded us of a Fata Morgana. At the same time, we didn’t want to hide how rough the real, prosaic life in Karltli is.

JP: We made some of the images look archival in order to honour the continuity of time, instead of splitting the past and the present across 4K-quality images and VHS. It’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but the past is still in the walls of Kartli; it's still in people’s minds and in the conversations they have.