A film about about an invisible connection with a departed loved one and the mystical possibility of soul reincarnation. The main character experiences the loss of his mother, but she comes to him in her new incarnation.

FROM THE DIRECTOR

“Georgian was the language of my childhood, indeed the only language I spoke till the age of five, but I lost it as I grew up and moved to another country. After listening to “Waltz”, without understanding the words, I produced a script to accompany the song's core message. On 27 January 2022 I scouted locations with Gigi Dedalamazishvili, the frontman of Mgzavrebi. Together we focused on Bakhmaro, an authentically rural location, high in the mountains and five hours outside the capital. We got caught in a snowstorm that was threatening avalanches.

We were lucky not to get stuck in the mountains for a couple of weeks, without any food or means of communication. We were lucky just to get back safe and sound.

It is worth mentioning that none of the video’s B&W footage is archival. I shot that personally, over a week last September in mountain villages far from hordes of tourists. The result becomes a metaphor for a world inhabited by the departed. We began shooting with a Scoopic camera but it broke down, so we continued with a Bolex from the 1960s –– and that gave us the newsreel effect we sought. The resulting footage included plenty of spoiled shots and underexposure, which actually increased that sense of an old newsreel. It’s a miracle we managed to record a sense of fragile timelessness, of life in the Georgian countryside.

Exactly nine months after our first scouting trip – on 27 October 2022 – we wound up by filming the birth of a child. While Gigi and I picked mountain locations, our future protagonist was conceived somewhere in Tbilisi.

Mgzavrebi and our crew dedicate this film to our dear, departed relatives – whom you’ll see in a collage at the end of the film.”

-Lado Kvataniya