Pirosmani

“Primitive magic… stunning to look at throughout — a masterpiece of cinematography and art direction… Its feeling for the artist and his work is powerful and quite unique. It is not just that if you stopped the movie at any one of a hundred points you would see perfectly re-created, the mood of the paintings themselves. That alone would have been an achievement. What the film also does is speak volumes in a still, quiet voice about the loneliness and melancholia that beset Pirosmani’s life and he nature of his astonishing art itself in relation to the world he observed. But if Pirosmani deals with the agony of creation and, in physical and sometimes mystical terms, with art itself, it also gives an extraordinary view of late nineteenth century Georgia; its faces, traditions and music. Everything is highly fragmented in style, linking only obliquely. But the whole summons up a world within a world with wholly remarkable perception. It is a film that conjures up magic…”

Derek Malcolm writing in the Guardian:

Pirosmani tells the story of Niko Pirosmani, Georgia’s most celebrated painter who died homeless in the early 20th century. His ‘naive’ style is visually interpreted as the story unfolds in the basement taverns of old Tbilisi and in front of village landscapes in wonderfully faded colour.

First screened in the UK at the 17th London Film Festival, Pirosmani was awarded the 1973 British Film Institute Award for being the most original and imaginative film to be shown at the Festival.