Georgian Short & Documentaries

Programme

Hidden In Frame

• Director(s): Ana Sarukhanova
• Country, year: GEO/UK | 2026
• Duration: 16 mins
• Language: in Georgian with English subtitles
• More information: short

Nata returns to Tbilisi, as the country is in the middle of the protests against an increasingly authoritarian government. She stays in her late grandmother’s flat and notices signs that someone else is staying there. As the country is being pulled apart she discovers secrets within her own family.

The Placekeepers

• Director(s): Robert Hope
• Country, year: GEO/UK | 2025
• Duration: 25 mins
• Language: in Georgian with English subtitles
• More information: documentary

The Placekeepers is a 25-minute documentary set in Tusheti, a remote region in Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains. Each winter, when the only road into the region closes for seven months, a small group of residents remains behind. The film follows a handful of people bound to the mountains by memory, pride, or nowhere else to go—an 83-year-old doctor, a painter obsessed with Hinduism, and the guard of a defunct Soviet power station.

The project is a close collaboration between director Robert Hope and Georgian-British filmmaker Anna R. Japaridze, who served as the film’s cinematographer and editor. The film does not romanticise Tusheti or approach it only through loss, but instead captures the humour, contradictions, care, and stubborn vitality of those who remain.

The film premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Short, and has since screened at Oscar-qualifying festivals in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Songs of Georgia

• Director(s): Jason Osborn
• Country, year: GEO/UK | 2009
• Duration: 53 mins
• : Narrated by Robert Parsons
• More information: documentary

…what violence has destroyed, love will rebuild again…

Mravalzhamier (Long Life) – traditional Georgian song

High up in the Caucasus mountains, the haunting harmonies of a male voice choir are heard as various landmarks of Georgia are introduced. British journalist Robert Parsons, now working for France24, first came to Georgia in the 1980s and was astonished that nearly every family he visited was able to sing traditional songs in complex harmony. Since then he has been a constant visitor to Georgia and witnessed much of the remarkable and often tragic events that have taken place. He has also built a house amongst the lush countryside and vineyards in the valley of Kakheti, the earliest recognised cradle of wine and regular invasion route of the Persians from the east.

With Rob Parsons as our guide, the film captures a unique musical journey through a cultural tradition, thousands of years old and still flourishing – but for how long?

Everywhere there is singing, and through the different regional communities explored, a picture emerges of the daily lives of a fiercely independent people deeply routed in a unique musical culture. Georgia is a country slightly smaller than Scotland but is very much influenced by its vast geographical diversity and surrounded by many ethnically and religiously unfriendly neighbours. A harsh and precarious existence, but nearly always a supra (feast) is on offer, where a new generation perform the songs and dances of their ancestors.