ALEXANDRE KOBERIDZE
Alexandre Koberidze is a Georgian film director born in Tbilisi in 1984. He studied at Georgia’s state film and theatre academy before moving to Berlin in 2009 where he attended the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie film school. His short films include Looking Back is Grace (2014), Colophon (2015) and Linger on Some Pale Blue Dot (2017). His debut feature film Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017) won the Grand Prix of the International Competition at FIDMarseille. His latest film, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), a playfully stylised work of magical realism set in Kutaisi, Georgia, won the FIPRESCI Prize at Berlin Film Festival 2022. He spoke to TANK about intuition in filmmaking, miracles, his artistic influences and Lionel Messi.
Interview by Matthew Janney
Portrait by Marius Land
Matthew Janney What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is about two teenagers who fall in love before a supernatural event changes their appearances overnight, preventing them from meeting again. How did you arrive at this story?
Alexandre Koberidze When I look back on the shorts and features I have made, what unites all these films is that they are all trying to capture a miracle. I try to find different ways to make some kind of miracle or magical event visible and to integrate this into our reality. I’m trying to not separate reality and fantasy, but on the contrary, to show that these kinds of things are happening all around us. This film was another attempt at this. Actually, it came about when I was working on another script, but when this other script was done, it was too big – it was a project that needed a lot of money. That’s when I started to look in my notebook where I write small ideas for future films. I found the idea for this film, and it was a bit different to the film I ended up making. It was about a boy and a girl falling in love and it was mainly about their first night, about how they fall in love. Then I started to write it and of course, many things changed. I made three really important changes: the first one was that the film would take place in Kutaisi; the second, that both of them would be transformed; and the third, that they would find each other in the end.
MJ Visually, the film encourages a very particular way of seeing the world, one that invites us to sit and marvel about particular details that might otherwise go unnoticed. We are often introduced to people through their feet or the back of their head, rather than their face, for example. Can you tell me about your filmmaking process and some of the decisions you made about where to focus the audience’s attention?
AK This is the biggest challenge. That’s where a film becomes a film rather than just some gathering of images and sounds – it all depends on what you show and what you hide. It’s a decision-making process where you have to be very careful. As a first step, I always want to show everything. I go out in Kutaisi, for example, and I want to show this and that or this person or that person, their eyes – everything – but somehow you have to choose. There are intuitional decisions to make, but also, of course, professional decisions. It has to be a mix. There are directors who try to calculate everything; there are others who completely trust their intuition. I’m somewhere in the middle where I try to think about what I am doing, but also leave space for feeling. That was quite interesting with What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? because it was in Kutaisi. When you arrive in a city where you don’t come from, you’re a stranger. If you work in a place where you belong and where you know everything, you can trust your intuition much more than where you are a guest. So Faraz Fesharaki, the cinematographer of the film, and I stayed in Kutaisi for a year before we started to shoot just to understand its logic. What should we show? What should we not? For example, we had a scene in a market. It had been in the script for a year and a half, it was all storyboarded, but two days before we wanted to shoot, we went there and felt it wasn’t right; it was too intimate. It’s a place that belongs to the city, where real life is going on. We would see too much.
MJ The city of Kutaisi is in many ways the film’s central character. You mentioned coming in as an outsider. Why did you choose to make the film there?
AK It was really a coincidence. The previous film I had made was in Tbilisi, I had a script set in Batumi, so Kutaisi [as the country’s third-biggest city] was more or less the next choice. I went a few times just to look around and on the very first day I was there, there were two moments where I thought, OK, it’s a good idea to make a film here. In the first draft, the main guy worked at a boxing machine, like the ones you put coins in at fairs and then you punch something. In the script, I had decided this machine would be standing on the White Bridge, and then the very first time I came to Kutaisi, late in the evening, we came to the White Bridge and there was one of those machines standing there already. This is a good coincidence, a good sign, I thought. That was the first. The next time I went to Kutaisi, with my brother, we discovered this music school by a river that we just loved. These two moments were quite important for me to say, yes, let’s make a film here. We were quite excited by the place but we also didn’t want to fall into the trap of romanticising it. On the one hand, Kutaisi is really beautiful; on the other, daily life is hard there. There were many places we wanted to put in the film, but we decided to leave these to the city.
MJ There is a strong documentary-like quality to the film. How much was scripted versus left to chance?
AK A year before we shot the film was the football World Cup in 2018, so we had the idea to go to Kutaisi just to film people watching football; we wanted to take the material and then use it later. But then we also started to shoot other things and after two weeks had gathered quite a lot of material. Later in the editing we mixed these completely unplanned situations with more scripted scenes. Also, part of our concept was about not blocking on set. I think this added to this feeling that anything could happen. Sometimes it’s hard because you have good things going on in front of your camera, the actors are doing everything right, and then someone moves into the frame, and you can’t use it. But as I experienced it, eight out of ten times, good things happen. It’s a risky thing, but mostly you get rewarded for not blocking.
MJ Football plays a big role in the film, thematically, dramatically. Football clearly means a lot to you.
AK There are different layers to it. Firstly, it’s just there for me, myself. I always wanted to become a football player but never did; it’s a kind of compensation for me to include football in the films I make. Also, it’s something I consider another miracle, the big emotions that football produces. It’s just a ball and 22 guys or girls, but still, it does something to me and to so many people. Another thing, when Leo Messi and Argentina lost against the Germans in the 2014 World Cup final, I knew that I wanted to make a film where he wins. I had this thought that as a filmmaker, I can make this happen. So I decided to set this story during the summer of the 2018 World Cup. And parallel to that story, Leo Messi will win the World Cup!
MJ Who are your cinematic influences?
AK I have a lot, all in very different ways. Different guys for different times, maybe. There are directors who I watch and borrow from like Nanni Moretti – I always watch his films and then want to make a film myself that very same day. I feel I also take a lot from Aki Kaurismäki. And then other directors, for example, Ken Loach. When I watched Kes, I felt it was something I couldn’t even touch, like I didn’t even understand how it was done or what was behind it. I have an admiration for filmmakers where I don’t understand what they’re even doing. Ken Loach is this kind of director; John Cassavetes is another. As a director, you watch these films and you think because you have some experience you can discern the logic behind them. But when you try to analyse them, you realise, OK, it’s impossible.
MJ Georgian directors – such as Tengiz Abuladze, Eldar Shengelaia and Otar Iosseliani – were hugely popular during the Soviet era. More recently, certain critics have started to talk about a new wave of contemporary Georgian filmmakers. Do you feel you belong to this movement?
AK I’d be happy to be part of some kind of movement, but I don’t think this exists yet. There used to be a thing that we called Georgian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. All these people who were making really different films but had something in common. It’s really interesting that very different people from very different backgrounds with different interests shared something that now we can name as Georgian cinema. Today, we have people who make films – some are good, some are bad – but they have no connection to one another. These things need a lot of time. Maybe after 30 or 40 years we’ll know.
MJ You’re on the road at the moment working on your new film. What is it about?
AK So far I’ve made two features and both were very attached to cities: one to Tbilisi and the one to Kutaisi. This new film is a road movie, which means we are driving around almost all of Georgia. Until now we’ve been driving for two months and next spring we’ll go again for two or three months maybe. It’s a very small team: me as director and cinematographer, my brother who will record the sound and compose the music and then my father who is driving and acting. I’m shooting on a small cell phone that I used in my previous film. I like it a lot. It is very, very low quality, but it’s super-small and you can film endlessly with it. So it’s practical because you don’t think about how much you shoot or anything. On a technical level, we’re not using light or lenses; we are quite free.
MJ You mentioned a future script about Batumi, a city that – like much of Georgia – is undergoing large-scale change and modernisation. Is part of your ambition to capture these sociological changes?
AK Batumi is changing so fast. Maybe half of the places mentioned in the script – which I only wrote two years ago – are not there or are not the same any more. It’s quite an absurd place. Now with this current road movie, we see a lot of Georgia and a lot of what is going on today because we just drive and film. But I don’t have any intention to say something specific about the country or the society or the people. There are many things we don’t know. So it’s more a way to understand what’s going on. The hope is that through the film we will understand something. ◉