How to film a country? What is a country in the movies? Or rather: is it possible to film a country in the movies? These are the questions that seem to run through the work of director Salomé Jashi, shown in its entirety at Porto/Post/Doc 2024. Born in 1981 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, the filmmaker has been trying since her first short film in 2006 to unveil her country to the world, which is largely unknown on the international scene - but not through big events, big characters or national heroes. Rather, her cinema reveals micro-history through the poetics of everyday life: ordinary people, forgotten or ignored places, the slow and imperceptible passage of daily time, and what they say about the land where she was born. Almost always shot using fixed shots, without the use of non-diegetic music, Jashi's films focus primarily on looking at space and the people who inhabit it. Without texts or expository narrations that explain or impose any kind of political analysis, the filmmaker invites the viewer to understand what those images - a half-abandoned building and its inhabitants, the wreckage of a helicopter in the middle of a rural area, a tree crossing the sea in a boat - reveal about the country portrayed. It is in this precise, austere and poetic observation of the relationship between space and people - how one affects, determines and transforms the other - that the director's cinema is built. In the close-ups of 'Speechless', Jashi exposes the horrors and effects of a war, portraying only the faces and diverse expressions of eight people who lived through it. In the very short four minutes of 'The Tower', the filmmaker finds the history of her country in the gaze and memory of its inhabitants, pointing out and describing spaces and places that remain in the extra-field, in a counter-plane that is never shown, because they only exist in the memories narrated by her characters. In 'Bakhmaro', she presents the daily life of an old, decaying building and the people who pass through it, serving as a small microcosm of contemporary Georgia. And in the acclaimed 'Taming the Garden', which won awards at festivals around the world, the relationship between human beings and space is laid bare in the megalomania of a millionaire who tries to transplant trees into his private garden - in images that poetically and almost surrealistically portray the history, politics and economics present in the landscape and the ways in which we intervene in it. In the extended duration of her shots, in a time that invites immersive and almost hypnotic contemplation, the Georgian filmmaker leaves room for the viewer to sit at the table with her characters, perceive between the lines and the cracks in those places and draw their own conclusions. Her cinema, in the eight films shown in this program, presents us with a Georgia made up of people, beautiful landscapes, rubble and the ruins of wars. A setting as specific as it is familiar, as unique as it is universal - distant and suddenly so close that we are inside it.
A Crypto Rush Aftermath
Salomé Jashi, Georgia, 2023, DOC, 18’
A Swim
Salomé Jashi, Georgia, 2011, DOC, 11’
Bakhmaro
Salomé Jashi, Germany, Georgia, 2011, DOC, 58’
trailer
Speechless
Salomé Jashi, Georgia, 2009, DOC, 12’
trailer
Taming The Garden
Salomé Jashi, Georgia, Germany, Switzerland, 2016, 74’
trailer
The Dazzling Light Of Sunset
Salomé Jashi, Georgia, Germany, 2018, DOC, 4’
trailer
Their Helicopter
Salomé Jashi, Georgia, United Kingdom, 2006, DOC, 22’
The Tower
Salomé Jashi, Georgia, 2021, DOC, 91’
trailer
