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Elene Naveriani’s film tells the story of a middle-aged single woman in a remote Georgian village whose life is changed for ever after a near-death experience

Here is a marvellously tender story of loneliness and love which starts with a bigger bang than most thrillers. Etero, played by Eka Chavleishvili, is a middle-aged single woman in a remote Georgian village who is out walking near a steep ravine, collecting blackberries for the cakes she likes to bake. She looks up, transfixed by the beauty of a blackbird – having been, we are perhaps invited to assume, only waiting for this moment to arrive – when she loses her footing and disappears from the frame; film-maker Elene Naveriani switches the viewpoint to something terrifying and vertiginous: straight down to a near death experience.

Etero sees her own corpse in a parallel universe of her own stricken imagining, but this heartstopping near-miss, together...

Georgian cinema continues to show thriving signs of life in Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, a film about a contently independent woman who is faced with the thrills and spills of companionship for the first time. A breakout at Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes earlier this year and a deserved winner, last week, of both best film and actress at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Blackbird is the latest from Elene Naveriani, a 38-year-old director who co-wrote the script with the writer and feminist activist Tamta Melashvili. From that collaboration springs an unlikely tale about the shock of attraction, about how bodies appear depending on how we see them and who’s looking, and about the joys of touch and solitude and whether or not they need be mutually exclusive.

Naveriani’s third feature opens with swagger and a literal cliffhanger: Eto, our immediately likable champion of self-sufficiency, is out picking berries when she...