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.
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