Georgian filmmaker George Ovashvili, best known for 2014 Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe winner “Corn Island,” is bringing his most personal work to date, “The Moon Is a Father of Mine,” to Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF), where it premieres in the main competition.
The film follows 12-year old Toma, expelled from school after being bullied. When he returns home, he finds his father Nemo, absent since Toma was two, waiting to take him to their ancestral village in the Caucasus mountains. Recently released from prison, Nemo is not welcome by the locals. But he is determined to pass down the ancient tradition of deer hunting to the boy. Over the course of this fateful weekend, Toma confronts the wilderness, a pack of wolves, his father’s shadowy past and his own fears.
Ovashvili says “The Moon is a Father of Mine” intertwines two true stories from his childhood: the father figure is based on an uncle who passed away, while Toma’s ordeal echoes the experiences of a boy he knew – possibly himself. Both threads, he tells Variety, are rooted in memories that shaped him, but at the heart of the film is his lifelong fascination with the father-son bond.
Unlike the clear physical connection between mother and child, he reflects, the father’s place is more uncertain: “[He is] someone you’re told is your father, but you don’t really know who he is. Yet you love him and this connection is very strong,” he says.
That ambiguity echoes in Ovashvili’s own memories. He recalls that his own father’s death left him unable to cry. “I couldn’t understand why – until I remembered that, as a child, I used to cry in my bed every night when I thought of my parents dying. I had already done all the crying.”
The title comes from an old Georgian poem that refers to the moon as a father, a metaphor that shapes the film’s tone: “The Moon Is a Father of Mine” unfolds more as a meditation than a conventional narrative. Its rhythm is slow and deliberate, its images layered with metaphor and its dialogue sparse. “Cinema is a language of visuals, not words,” Ovashvili says. “You only use words when you cannot tell something with images.”
That visual approach, developed with cinematographer Christos Karamanis, mirrors the director’s own blurred perception of waking and imagined worlds. “I wanted to be on the line between dream and reality,” he explains. “I’m always a little out of reality myself,” he continues, “Sometimes I don’t know where the line is. There were periods in my life when I switched them – I lived my dreams as reality, and reality felt like the dream. I turned it upside down.”
Ovashvili again teams up with longtime collaborators Roelof Jan Minneboo – with whom he co-wrote the Karlovy Vary winning “Corn Island” – and Joseph Bardanashvili who crafted a soundscape blending silence, natural sounds, and melodies.
As with his acclaimed debut “The Other Bank,” Ovashvili cast his young lead, Giorgi Gigauri, from a chance encounter in a Georgian village during location. The father is played by well-known Georgian actor Givi Chuguashvili, rarely seen in leading roles. Both are expected to attend the Tallinn premiere.
The shoot, a co-production between Ovashvili’s Wagonnet Films, and Germany, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Turkey, took place in hard winter conditions, stretching from 32 days to 42 – a process Ovashvili describes as “the hardest film of my life.”
While the backdrop evokes Georgia’s post-Soviet upheaval, Ovashvili stresses the film is driven not by history but emotion. “My earlier films were tied to my country, to its history. That was a different kind of pain,” he says. “But this film is my personal pain. It’s about the father-and-son relationship.”
After Tallinn, Ovashvili plans to continue developing new projects, including another story drawn from his childhood inspired by a tragic accident in his village, and one centered on a family tragedy.
“The Moon Is a Father of Mine” has its world premiere at PÖFF on Nov. 20. The festival runs through Nov. 23.