Tbilisi-Tbilisi

Bleak, oppressive, and utterly without hope, this was Georgia's submission to the Academy last year for Best Foreign Film. The story, such as it is, concerns a filmmaker writing a script, which we see played out in black-and-white segments throughout the film, as he travels around the city meeting friends and crooked politicians and getting beaten by the police because he fits the profile of a drug addict. Every scene is more harrowing than the one that came before it. This film depicts a Tbilisi of thieves, rapists, and drug addicts with corruption at every level of authority, on its last leg with a dying past and an aborted future. As a film it's not perfect, but its only real problems are mere technical issues like dialogue sync. It's definitely a powerful statement -- I suppose the reason it hasn't been distributed anywhere is simply because it's just too bleak. The very end of the credits read, in large Roman letters, "S.O.S."