Ioseliani

“Even if someone feels sad after watching my films, they are fundamentally happy and bright. I know it.”

Otar Ioseliani

Otar Ioseliani, who turns 70 on February 2, might be one of the world’s most unconventional film directors. He defines his films as “abstract comedies.” Full of intelligent irony, absurd to the point of being surreal, his films resemble dreams. Sometimes they are silent dreams, with only occasional dialogue, and unrestrained, freely-wandering plots. Unfolding amidst diverse cultural contexts – Soviet, émigré, Georgian, Russian, French – Ioseliani’s reality is without borders.

“For me, the best film – the truest film – is the kind which requires no translation.”

It has always been of no importance to Ioseliani whether a person is a shoemaker or a Nobel Prize winner – the director has a marvelous ability to see the human being through the many layers of social status. Perhaps this is because he has created his own value system, his own carefully organized world – a world so wonderfully represented in his films.

“In all cases we always know that everything ends badly in this world.”

Otar Ioseliani was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1934. He graduated first from a musical college, then from the Mathematical Department at Moscow State University. Later, he studied directing under the famous Soviet filmmaker, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, at the State Filmmaking Institute (VGIK), graduating in 1965.

In the early 1980s, after nearly two decades of filmmaking in the Soviet Union, Ioseliani went to France. He did not emigrate. Instead, he went to France, he said, in search of a quiet place to do what he wanted – to make films. Today, when a film is finished, Ioseliani returns to Tbilisi, where his family still lives.

“Movie houses are being turned into supermarkets. Actors talk non-stop. Everything is OK; there is no need to watch the screen; you can just go on crunching peanuts … The audience believes this is what real cinema is.”

Ioseliani’s mode of work is as unconventional as his films. He looks for funding independently, refusing to conform to the commercial realities of Hollywood-style filmmaking. Ioseliani also rarely uses professional actors.

Documentary filmmaker Mikhail Demourov described how Ioseliani finds the characters for his films in Paris bistros and bars: “Talking about life to all these people, whom he often hardly knew but saw somewhere, he could tell whether they would fit into the world of his films. And he could also judge their reactions in different situations. Mind you, not all old ladies can ride bicycles carrying a baguette and wagging their bottom like the lady in Butterfly Hunt.”

Ioseliani thoroughly prepares every film with storyboards, so that he has a full conception of the film and can conceive if interesting improvisations will work within the wider concept of the film. He also does not use scripts, but puts the actors into situations and tells them what to do, relying on the outcomes of their natural interactions and abilities.

“There is no greater joy than to share our happy and careless attitude to things that cannot be changed with the reader and the audience.”