Everyone has their own cross to bear, metaphorically at least, and sometimes literally, a point hammered home in Georgia’s sublimely beautiful Academy Awards submission Citizen Saint. Directed and co-written by Tinatin Kajrishvili, this tragicomic fable about superstition, crucifixion and blind faith enters the Oscars race on a wave of festival prizes and critical raves, including a very positive early review from The Film Verdict following its Karlovy Vary world premiere.
Set in a remote mining town, Kajrishvili’s third feature following the feted Brides (2014) and Horizon (2018) revolves around a statue of a local “saint” nailed to a towering wooden cross, believed to be petrified body of a former miner with protective powers over his fellow workers. After museum officials take the statue down for restoration, it mysteriously vanishes. So when a mute stranger arrives in town soon afterwards, bereft locals presume the saint has returned in human form. Indeed, this mysterious outsider does appear to possess miraculous powers. But inevitably, a flesh-and-blood messiah proves a far more problematic prospect than a symbolic statue. Faith, hope and celebration soon give way to mistrust, tension and violence.
Speaking to The Film Verdict down the line from Tblisi, Kajrishvili and her producer Lasha Khalvashi are taking a home break in the middle of a pre-Oscars promotional tour of the US. International reactions have reassured the pair that Citizen Saint has universal resonance. The good news is you do not need to be from Georgia to appreciate the film’s sardonic critique of spiritual delusion, magical thinking and macabre religious syncretism.
“I don’t think so,” says Kajrishvili. “When I had a chance to meet audiences in different countries and to read articles from the film critics, I was very happy. I had this great feeling when somebody really gets the point and understands my hidden hints. That leads me to think you don’t need to be Georgian.”
Kajrishvili initially conceived Citizen Saint as a comedy, but it became more like a bleakly absurd metaphysical parable during its long gestation. The final version is not a simplistic satire on religious faith, the director says, “more about how we treat religion, and how different we are in this attitude. That’s why I needed several characters with totally different perspectives on this subject.”
No spoilers here, but Citizen Saint offers no clear “explanation” for its miraculous plot twists. Kajrishvili leaves the question open, on screen and off. “I think there is something beyond this reality,” she nods. “That’s why I needed to have characters who have their own reality, like Berdo. For him, there is no big boundary or even a line between life and death. I wanted to underline that miracles happen, you just need to look around and discover. I did not even want it to make it like a miracle, I wanted it to be very normal, a usual thing in people’s lives.”
Although Kajrishvili was initially wary about making a film with magical elements, she was encouraged by apparently miraculous antics close to home in Tbilisi. “I was like, how can you make an audience watch a person going around who was a statue a week ago?” she laughs. “Then, in my neighbourhood, we really have this so-called Saint Nicholas, who has a lot of followers and believers. His Facebook page is full of videos about his miracles, the people themselves record this. For example, they were childless, then they ate the tomato grown by Nicholas and now they are with kids. This person exists. And he’s not even Saint Nicholas any more, he is ‘King Nariman’…”
Most of the Citizen Saint shoot took place around the mining town of Chiatura in western Georgia, a spectacular landscape of rusting cable cars, rugged mountain crags and crumbling infrastructure. Kajrishvili and her cinematographer Krum Rodriguez have turned this derelict post-industrial backwater into a series of ravishingly beautiful monochrome tableaux. “If not for Chiatura, I wouldn’t make this film,” the director explains. “I wanted to create a microcosmos, this area was really showing us that we spend our life working. We see others only going to work or coming back from work, but we don’t really follow where they live, what kind of life they lead. We also shot in another town, Rustavi, where we have a giant metallurgical factory from Soviet times.”
Kajrishvili and Khalvashi enlisted real miners as extras, and even shot some of the most hallucinatory sequences deep underground inside a real working mine. “Eighty per of the script was happening either at night, or in the dark,” the director explains. “It was a great challenge to shoot, imagine shooting in the tunnels kilometres down. We had a great production designer with whom we created these lights, helmets with flashlights, which enabled us to kind of paint with a single ray of the light in the darkness. It was very brave of Krum to follow me with this.”
The entire production process, Khalvashi adds, was fraught with risk. “It’s a very dangerous mine because they are very old and very narrow place to work in,” he says. “You cannot bring any special equipment. We were wearing the same uniforms and equipment as the minors, so there was no difference.”
Adding an extra level of peril, Citizen Saint was shot during multiple waves of coronavirus lockdown. “That was a time when there was no vaccine, and there was a huge threat of death,” Khalvashi nods. “We started pre-production then the first wave of Covid happened, so we postponed. Then the second time, we postponed again. But the third time we didn’t stop, we risked it all. It was very intense and really stressy. But Tina made it happen.” Fortunately, both director and producer avoided infection. “We were praying to the saint,” Khalvashi laughs. “Yes, he protected us.”
Citizen Saint is part of an ongoing boom in high-calibre Georgian cinema to emerge over the past 20 years, as the newly independent republic shook off decades of Soviet rule to establish its own confident cinematic voice. Since the creation of the National Film Centre two decades ago, Georgia has consistently punched above its weight on the global stage with critically lauded festival hits including In Bloom (2013), Scary Mother (2017) and Otar’s Death (2021), plus the Oscar-shortlisted Corn Island (2014).
Kajrishvili believes this high strike rate is partly because the country’s film-making community is a tight, mutually supportive pool of talents who often work together. “On each project, we really help as much as we can,” she says. “That’s very important for such a small industry. Everyone knows each other, everyone helps each other and supports each other. Without this, it is not possible for us to raise our voice because we don’t have funds, we don’t have a market, we don’t speak English, the language is different. So all this support really helped us to survive and show our films abroad.”
Khalvashi also makes the point that some of the Soviet Union’s most feted film-makers were actually Georgian: prize-winners like Tengiz Abuladze, Otar Iosseliani and Nana Jorjadze. “Many Soviet or Russian directors are in reality Georgians,” he nods. “And this huge gap which happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for 10 or 12 years there was nothing happening, and it created so big a demand on the cultural people that it was kind of a blast afterwards. It’s still going, we as a people had a lot of stories to tell. That’s one of the most important parts: not only knowing your profession, but also having an interesting story to tell.”
Even today, 20 years after the “Rose Revolution” loosened Moscow’s lingering grip on Tblisi, Russia remains a phantom menace in Georgian culture. The war in Ukraine is an especially prickly topic for this fellow post-Soviet state, which has a similar back story of invasion and partial occupation by Russian forces over the last 15 years. As with Ukraine, Putin’s military now occupies large chunks of Georgia as punishment for the country’s pro-western drift and EU membership ambitions.
“I experienced in my lifetime two wars with Russia already,” Khalvashi sighs. “At the moment 20% of our territory is occupied by Russian army. This is what happened with us before Ukraine and nobody really paid enough attention. We have this constant sense of danger from our neighbour. But people are optimistic, we keep living, we keep making films, and we see ourselves in Europe, which the majority see as the inevitable way Georgia will develop. So this is what we think. Hopefully there will be peace in our land and all the occupiers will go back to their country.”
