Bunches of cellophane-wrapped flowers are gathered up and bundled out of a funeral wake in a Tbilisi apartment before the mourners that line the casket have even left as director Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity opens. This is a city in which Orthodox religious rituals persist as the traditional skeleton of daily life, but the energies of the down and out on the margins are diverted by the harsh business of survival, and every object is eyed as a potential money-spinner, for re-use or resale. Georgia’s capital Tbilisi has become a veritable open-air thrift market in this scrappily episodic and freewheeling, dry-humoured debut feature, which had its world premiere in the Cineasti del Presente competition at the Locarno Film Festival, and in which eccentric, street-cast derelicts and hustlers sort through and redistribute the cast-offs of times past.
In this corroded urban landscape of junk and quirky knick knacks, where pedestrians stop to haggle over old pots and car parts are sought out on the cheap, Bart (Nikolo Ghviniashvili), a trans man and junk dealer with a taste for gambling, teams up with Gonga (Nika Gongadze), a long-haired youth in a Misfits T-shirt, for a door-to-door start-up enterprise selling neon crucifixes. Gonga’s father has just died, and a compliment the pair receive at the cemetery for their craftwork after they jazz up one of the rusty crosses they find in an old chest in the scrapyard with LED lighting sparks their dreams of a lucrative market. They imagine their neon crucifixes spreading across the country, glowing against the skyline.
Visits to apartments by Bart and Gonga as they try to make sales reveal more strange, charming worlds of objects and rituals, some embracing and others departing from tradition. An aquarium contains an owner’s reconfigured pantheon of Buddha and pharoah figurines; a boisterous meal is marked by toasts and harmonies praising Georgian wine; a contortionist determinedly folds himself into a small, glass-sided box. This is a city teeming with an irrepressible playfulness and personality, even when money is tight.
Bart, who sleeps in a car and is in debt to some gangsters, has a tightknit group of queer friends to celebrate life events with, but segments of the wider society are unaccepting of his identity, not least the surly creditors, when they turn to heavy intimidation to demand repayment, and get their hands on his identity documents. This echoes real-life discrimination against actor Ghviniashvili, who took a gender recognition case to the European Court after Georgian authorities refused to issue him new documents matching his gender. Meanwhile Gonga, amid the struggles of the new enterprise, spends aimless hours mulling the mysterious nature of friendship and love.
The scrapyard is a rambling site for both collecting objects and just hanging out, the dire prospects for regular work in the city meaning time in the day must be passed somehow, smoking weed or swinging from a crane, or with a lovelorn song of rejection torn between longing and colourful curses while reclining on a tower of tyres. Static shots frame spaces of absurd clutter as if they are parodic tableaux of great scenes from history; certainly, there is a sense that capitalistic greed has sucked the dignity from Tbilisi, and made the work of simply living a corrupt and hollow game. Stray dogs wander across the screen, on their own nocturnal missions on the long summer nights, and cramped apartments brim with cats. The city’s citizens often speak of the emotional lives of their pets, be it a jealous angelfish, or a canine friend that can’t put its intelligent observations into words. There is a sense of equality among all these beings on the margins, we get the sense, outside the bitter hierarchies of power, even if it comes from being at the bottom of the pile, with nothing. “Winning and losing are two faces of the same coin,” as Bart says, in a world where getting ahead is just a sef-indulgent daydream.
Director, Cinematography: Tato Kotetishvili
Screenwriters: Tato Kotetishvili, Irene Jordania, Nutsa Tsikaridze
Editing: Nodar Nozadze
Cast: Nikolo Ghviniashvili, Nika Gongadze
Producers: Tato Kotetishvili, Tekla Machavariani
Music: Nodar Nozadze, Nika Paniashvili, Vaqo
Production Design: Nato Bagrationi, Anuka, Kalandarishvili
Production companies: Zango Studio (Georgia), Nushi Film (Georgia), GOGO Film (The Netherlands), The Film Kitchen (The Netherlands)
Sales: zangostudio@gmail.com
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Cineasti del Presente)
In Georgian
95 minutes
