FILMS RETROSPECTIVES.:GETTING TO KNOW OTAR IOSSELIANI

Since 1985 the Festival has been putting together open-format retrospective cycles dedicated to different active filmmakers, including such artists as Roman Chalbaud, John Sayles, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Eloy de la Iglesia, Peter Bogdanovich, Terry Gilliam, Bertrand Tavernier o Bernardo Bertolucci.

Otar Iosseliani

Otar Iosseliani fits the double role of being a classic unknown to most audiences, who have never been given the chance to discover his work.

That's the reason for this first, a retrospective dedicated to a filmmaker at which we will take a look at his entire work. Iosseliani was born in 1934 in the then Soviet Republic of Georgia, an intersection of roads, religion and race. He graduated from the Moscow School in 1954, going on to make his first medium-length movie in 1961, "Aprili" ("April"), which even at that early stage gave a clear indication of his cinematographic tendencies: Each shot, each fragment of the film, is a chosen point of view. No director can rid himself of his own nature, of his own culture, of his own life. His earlier works had serious problems with the strict political censorship of the time. But his name shot straight over the border in 1971 with his beautiful film "Iko shashvi mgalobeli"("Lived Once a Song-Thrush"), on the subject of which Iosseliani himself said: I think I've made a simple and serious film, a film about social morals rather than a moralistic film. "Pastorali", shot in 1975, was blocked by the authorities until it was presented in 1981 at the Berlin Festival, where it won the Critics' Prize. Tired of struggling against his country's censorship, Iosseliani moved to France in 1982, where he continued to live and work on titles including "Les favoris de la lune" ("Favourites of the Moon", 1984) and "Et la lumière fut" (1989).

His work, unorthodox, difficult to classify, anchored to realism and nature, but tinged with a poetical, lucid touch, deserves to be discovered by an audience until now ignorant of its existence for commercial, cultural or other reasons. The Otar Iosseliani retrospective is a challenge for those desirous of discovering that cinema is a vast subject still capable of turning up hidden places full of beauty.