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Since Otar Left - a film by Julie Bertuccelli

“Approaches a state of perfection! A tale of deep family bonds and the lies we weave out of love.”
- New York Newsday

“Beauitful! Touching! A trio of sublime performances”
- Variety

“Indelible... Deeply poignant... Sublime!”
- The Hollywood Reporter

Winner of the prestigious Critics' Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and featuring a trio of stunning performances, Julie Bertuccelli's exquisite Since Otar Left is a bittersweet tale of deception and affection.

Three Georgian women - strong-willed matriarch Eka (90-year-old former dental assistant and fledgling star Esther Gorintin), her long-suffering daughter Marina (Nino Khomassouridze) and rebellious granddaughter Ada (Freeze, Die, Come To Life's Dinara Droukarova) - all live together in their stately yet crumbling apartment in contemporary Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic. Eka pines for her beloved son Otar, a physician who is now a construction worker in Paris. Marina is deeply resentful of her mother's obsession with her absent brother, while Ada endures their bickering and yearns for a more adventurous existence. When a friend of Otar's calls with tragic news, Marina and Ada must make a seemingly impossible choice: Do they keep Eka from learning the truth?

Former assistant director to Bertrand Tavernier and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Bertuccelli deftly spins the delicate threads of familial conflict and maternal love into a bewitching tangle of intergenerational duplicity.

 

2003, France, 102 Min. In French, Georgian and Russian with English subtitles.