Blackbird, Blackberry

In a small town in Georgie lives a humble woman. Her name is Etero. She is single, end fourties and her daily live consists of managing a small drug store and seeing other women in town who like to gossip and are quite critical to Etero. Etero was raised with strikt valies and norms and with the heavy weight on her shoulders that her birth was the cause of the cancer and death of her mother.

One day she goes to the river to pick blackberries and slides off a cliff. She nearly got killed. This event changes her live and view on live forever!

She starts living her own life, with a new attitude towards her dead family, although hidden from the gossiping women in town.

As a person who also went through a near dead experience I can very much relate to what such an event can do to you. It is truly life changing. This has been very well pictured in this movie. I watched it three times in twi days and it struck me every time again.

I like stories where characters are living with a specific situation and being able to discover new things around life and Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry does a good character study drama with sweet atmospheres, good camerawork, wry humor, and good performance from Eka Chavleishvili.

Throughout, the camerawork is purposeful with colorful production and settings. The direction from the filmmaker was solid on capturing the tone, narrative structure, and concepts throughout as well. All in all it's a good sweet movie. Georgian cinema isn't something I talk much from but it was nice to see a movie from Georgia.

"Etero" (Eka Chavleishvili) runs a curious shop in a small town that only seems to sell soap powder and hair dyes! Anyway, one morning her delivery man "Murman" (Temiko Chichinadze) turns up with thirty boxes of a new washing formula and next thing, well it's taken her forty-eight years! He is married and lives a distance away, but he seems keen to take their new found friendship forward, even though he is to take on a lucrative trucking job in Turkey. She? Well she's always been an independent woman who looks after herself on her own terms - and she likes it that way. Or does she? Is it just what she is used to. As she continues to associate with her judgmental, opinionated and gossiping neighbours, she starts to consider just what her life is all about. Then something quite unexpected happens? That requires a trip to the bright lights of Tbilisi where she feels sure the next stage of her life will begin. It has the nature of a fly-on-the-wall documentary to it. We watch this woman whose life has been one of routine (and frequent thunderstorms) come to challenge a mundane existence that, aside from a perilous experience with some blackberry bushes atop a ravine, is the same from one day to the other. We learn a little of her backstory, of a traditional Georgian family dynamic and though the whole thing is inconclusive, the performance from Chavleishvili is nonetheless engaging and probably emblematic of many middle aged people who have sort of drifted into a limbo that is going nowhere fast. It's worth it all just for the look on her face near the end...

The title might lead you to expect a film about discontinued stealth bombers or telecommunications technologies. Far from it. This is a still-life from rural Georgia, timeless apart from mobile phones, modern medicine and some of the younger cast members.

The film is strange and beguiling with a remarkable performance by Eka Chavleishvili. She plays Etero, a middle-aged single woman obliged by events to look closely at how content with her lot she actually is. Chavleishvili's face and body are astonishingly expressive.

Even so, 'Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry' feels longer than the 110mins advertised. As Etero struggles to come to terms with her life - past, present and future - you can't help thinking that her catty friends would have done a better job in the editing suite.

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry is entirely led by its central actor who plays a woman with a particular idea about life. Single for 48 years, she is shielded from the comments, opinions, and expectations of the society, and more importantly, her close circle of girlfriends who are all married, with kids. However, things take a turn when a man enters her life and she lets him. This is a poignant drama about longing and loneliness, set in a remote Georgian village that gets excited at the mention of a shopping mall. Some wry humour, lots of full nudity, and a few metaphors are all what you'll find in this dreamy, meandering film that aims to show what happens when life suddenly happens. I love the lead actor and I hope we get to see more of her.

(Watched at the 2023 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)