A projector, a basement, and forty strangers
Every Thursday evening in Tbilisi's Vera district, a projector flickers to life in a converted wine cellar. The audience — students, expats, retirees, a few tourists who found the listing on Telegram — settles into mismatched chairs.
Tonight it is Stalker. It is always, eventually, Stalker.
Cinema is a mosaic made of time.
Why Georgia?
Georgia's relationship with Russian culture is complicated — shaped by centuries of imperial pressure, a brief war in 2008, and the ongoing presence of tens of thousands of Russian emigrants since 2022. Yet Georgian cinephilia has always had room for Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, and the broader tradition of poetic cinema.
The new audience
What strikes me most is the age of the audience. Half are under thirty. They have grown up with YouTube and TikTok, yet here they are, sitting through a 163-minute meditation on faith and decay.
Perhaps the appeal is precisely the slowness — the antidote to the scroll.