In a picturesque dell in Vakisofeli, in northern Georgia, lies a ramshackle dairy farm inhabited by Sanata Tokhosashvili and her adult son, Guri, who are the subjects of the stately observational documentary, Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer.
Made by documentarian Giorgi Parkosadze, the film was previously selected for the Docu Rough Cut Boutique – a development initiative run by Sarajevo Film Festival and the Balkan Documentary Centre – where it won the DOK Leipzig Preview Award. Now, this patient and beautiful and sensitive film returns to have its world premiere as a part of Sarajevo’s 2023 edition. A delicate but deceptively thought-provoking gem, it competes in the perennially interesting documentary section of the main competition programme.
Parkosadze spent time creating his pastoral portrait across four years, during which he would effectively embed himself on the farm, living there with Sanata and Guri for periods of time. In interviews, he has spoken about feeling the need to contribute and so sometimes left his camera packed away for a day while collecting firewood or trying to make himself useful. The impact of this can be felt in the intimacy and easiness of the material he has captured. The physical descriptions of what the film entails are fairly mundane: Guri milks one of their cows, Sanata works the cheese curd, a mower engine is fixed, and an old leaking barn roof is stripped. Sometimes, Parkosadze’s camera just sits stationary as its subjects do, lazing indoors out of the summer heat. But all of these apparently unfussy shots are captured with an arresting authenticity.
It is a cliché to say that the landscape becomes almost something of a character throughout this, but in Parkosadze’s hands, it certainly exudes some intangible resonance. The image regularly cuts away from the workaday tasks being performed by the duo to cast its lens across the steep hillside fields, or the weft and weave of the valley. They tend to be lingering shots, usually with livestock the closest thing to a focal point, but it is the effect of the entire tableau that is so enthralling. The filmmaker’s eye seems drawn to the ways the weather caresses their homestead – a couple of shots with drifting mist are particularly evocative – and on occasion, a shot that seems to be just cattle in a field reveals itself to contain Sanata or Guri, watching their charges, or wrangling them with the help of one of the farm’s characterful dogs.
The way that the characters disappear into their environs seems to speak volumes about the kind of longstanding bond they have with this landscape. It is interesting that Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer premieres alongside a short documentary at Sarajevo, Fran and Verka; or A Usual Day in an Abandoned Village, in which an ageing couple live a similarly secluded life in an abandoned Kosovan village they refuse to vacate. Both films ostensibly depict a place from which most people have now departed and are interested in the ones that remain – but the way Parkosadze subtly elides the people and locale of his film suggests a more potent force keeping Sanata and Guri tied to Vakisofeli. This is particularly true for Guri, who is clearly devoted to his mother.
Some of the press materials for the film frame it as the portrait of a mother-son bond, and it certainly is that, though perhaps not a typical way. At its most fundamental, Requiem shows the comfort and familiarity that are the upshot of more than 20 years of such proximity. Both mother and son speak sparingly, only when language is required to elucidate something, but Parkosadze finds a moving contentment in the silences during which neither feels compelled to say anything. Several scenes in which they sit together, uncommunicative, are redolent with the sense of familial understanding in a way that is not always easy to convey on screen. The implication of all this is a reaffirmation of Guri’s consistent presence on the farm, despite the pull of the nearby town where they sell their wares, Dusheti.
In fact, the potential departure of Guri, while never explicitly addressed in a conversation between the two of them, does encroach on the idyll of the withdrawn rustic in several different ways. Perhaps the most obvious of these is during the visit of two young Belgians who stay with them for one summer to learn more about a farming lifestyle. Amaury and Jasmijn are in their twenties and have a ready rapport with Guri – in one sequence the three of them discuss career possibilities in English, with Guri imaging becoming a software engineer and CEO.
Whether Sanata is able to follow their conversation or not remains tantalisingly unclarified. But with a girlfriend of Guri’s later entering the scenario, and Parkosadze choosing to conclude his film with a winter sequence in which the farm is silent and laden with snow, the future seems uncertain. The word ‘Requiem’ in the film’s title suggests a lament for something lost, and while the ‘hot days of summer’ might be the heyday of smallholder farming, it may also refer to the shifting tides of a mother’s primacy in her son’s life. That such nuances are redolent in a film that might at first glance seem quaint and simplistic, only heightens its poignancy.
Director, cinematography: Giorgi Parkosadze
Producers: Tamta Tvalavadze, Angelos Tsaousis
Editing: Fernando Restelli, Giorgi Parkosadze
Sound: Beso Kacharava, Giorgi Murghulia, Mariam Dieser
Production: Attic Production (Georgia), Filmografik Productions (Greece)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Documentary Film)
In Georgian
75 minutes
