Levan Koguashvili‘s “Guria” will world premiere in Venice’s Spotlight section on Sept. 9. The black-and-white tragicomedy, set in the western Georgian Guria region, follows Zuriko, a 45-year-old widower and farmer as he struggles to find love, as well as a fair price on hazelnuts.
“Guria” is a co-production between Georgia‘s Kino Iberica, Switzerland’s Cineworx, Luxembourg’s Tarantula and Bulgaria’s ArtFest, with support reaching further afield, including Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Norway’s SoRFond Film Fund and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Fund.
It’s the director’s fourth feature, following “Street Days” (2010), winner of a Tiger Award at Rotterdam; “Blind Dates” (2013), which scooped the Special Jury Award at Abu Dhabi, and “Brighton 4th” (2021), which took prizes at Tribeca and Cottbus. “Guria” was written by Koguashvili with Boris Frumin, a former professor and longtime collaborator.
Variety spoke with Koguashvili in Venice about “Guria” ahead of the film’s premiere.
This project is a seven-country co-production with global financing. Can you discuss how Guria came to interest so many parties in telling a Georgian story?
Koguashvili: Basically, the idea of bringing in so many parties came from financing. We had to look for many co-producers. In our case, you get a little bit of money from different places. Of course, it’s harder to manage a production when so many people are involved, but on the other hand, it makes for a very international crew. You have a sound guy from Switzerland, an editor from Luxembourg… it’s fun. I was really grateful that people got interested in this crazy story about friendship and love in Guria and found support in different countries. And Saudi Arabia came in at the very last moment. We were still raising money for some pickup shoots, and we brought the film to the Red Sea industry park and showed 20 minutes. We won a couple of awards there, and that’s how the Saudi co-producers came on board. It was a really great help, at the very last moment.
Can you talk about co-writing the film? What did that collaboration look like, and what did each of you bring to the story?
Koguashvili: Boris was my professor at NYU’s graduate program, and we ended up becoming friends and working together after school. There’s a an age difference (he’s almost 80 now), but we started collaborating during my first film there, and it’s kept going ever since. The way it works: I bring the material, Georgian scenes, life situations, characters, protagonists, and we discuss what to do with it, how to connect the story. What matters most is having strong scenes. You need a handful of very strong, cinematic scenes, and the rest can be good around them. So I lean hard on that. Boris is great at organizing and constructing material. He’s very much a teacher in that sense, about the logic of story development, and that’s what I learned from him. I loved his classes, in terms of how he approaches structure.
What about Georgia and Guria in the ’90s make it the time and place to anchor this story? What has changed about that world?
Koguashvili: I like Georgian provinces very much because they still have an authentic feeling. Big cities look alike everywhere now, but the provinces have their own flavor, and Guria especially has a very strong character. So it was already somewhere in my mind. Then I happened to read a book, “Gurian Diaries.” It was melancholic, about the poverty and the humor of that time, but there wasn’t really a story in it, just a guy remembering his childhood. I liked the atmosphere, so I called the author and asked if he had a concrete story. He didn’t, but he suggested we go to Guria together and see what we’d find. I spent maybe two or three months there. Once I felt I had enough material, I took everything to Boris, and in about three days we had the shape of a story, a plot.
Your work tends to straddle this line of hardship and comedy. What draws you to that place, finding light in the darkness?
Koguashvili: Several things, maybe, but mostly, this is how I see life. I don’t see even tragic moments as complete tragedy; life is always full of dimensions. By introducing irony and humor, you don’t make a tragic story less tragic. It just gets a different feeling, it becomes more human, and it’s easier to digest. It also gives the story a kind of lightness and lyricism, which I love. I believe tragedy and drama have to be told with some comedy in them. You try to find levity or humor even in the darkest, most dramatic situation. It’s also a way of working against cliché: when you think of the ’90s in a post-Soviet country, you picture a very dark movie, right? But I think that’s become a cliché too, and working against it is its own challenge. Also, Georgian character isn’t simple. Georgian life in that period was extremely difficult, but there was also a kind of absurdity to it, even a charm. So many things, but usually the films I love have that quality. They’re all comedies about tragedies. It’s a very tragic story, but the telling of it is full of comedy.
How did you come to use singing and song as such an important narrative tool in Guria? Can you talk about the songs the characters sing through the film?
Koguashvili: Georgia has a very strong tradition of folk singing, and Georgian singing is polyphonic. Usually there are three voices, but depending on the region, some songs have five, six, sometimes seven parts. It’s very complex, almost like Stravinsky, in a way. If you listen closely, it’s an absolute improvisation, done by people with no formal musical education, just peasants improvising, but creating enormously original music. Singing is also very much part of Georgian culture more broadly, of the Georgian dinners we call supra, when people gather around the table. I grew up in a family where we had those dinners often, 20 or 30 people coming to the house, drinking wine, and singing. So for Guria, I met a very interesting composer, the head of a folk center who works with traditional folk musicians. I told him I wanted to do something in the Georgian tradition but approached differently, not polyphonic, but a single voice, because a single voice felt more intimate to me. He’s from Guria himself, so he understood what I meant.
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