After watching the ‘Citizen Saint’ at the Asian World Film Festival this past month, I spoke with the producer Lasha Khalvashi and director Tinatin Kajrishvili.
While I already knew that Georgian food was exceptional and its method of winemaking was 5,000 years old, fermented in unique clay amphora buried in the earth, I did not know that its language is the most ancient non-Indo-European of Europe. Nor did I know that it shares a 556 mile border with Russia who has five permanent military bases in South Ossetia manned by approximately 5,000 army troops, border guards and FSB personnel another 5,000 based in Abkhazia. Nor did I know that the most famous Georgian of all is the Dictatort Joseph Stalin whose life will be the subject of a US$10 million film Lasha is about to produce. Don’t we need to know as much as we can about Stalin? A former priest-in-training turned gangster, Stalin knew how to appeal to the masses until he walked them to their grave. A populist if ever there was one, on par with Hitler himself, the devil incarnate.
Georgia’s 3 million people are still free — perhaps for the first time in their millennia-old world which throughout history has been constantly invaded either by the East or the West. Constantly.
Citizen Saint takes us to a time seemingly under Stalin’s Soviet Rule but it is actually today, as the mining town has changed very little except it is now independent of USSR. The story, essentially an absurdist reenactment of The Passion Play, is reminiscent of the 1957 film by Jules Dassin (Never on Sunday), He Who Must Die written by Kazanzackis (The Last Temptation of Christ). However, neither Lasha nor Tinatin had ever heard of Jules Dassin or his film.
This satirical black-and-white parable about a saint who descends the cross to live among mortals explores the complexities of faith and human nature, when the patron saint of the harsh mining community comes to life.
Known for her Berlinale titles, the Panorama Audience Award winning Brides and Horizon, Tinatin Kajrishvili’s third feature should extend her reputation beyond Europe (where she is well known) to the U.S.
How did you come to make this film?
I read a short story called Bye Amigo by a Georgian woman writer about a saint who comes alive and wanders among the people. It took a lot of time to figure out how write the script and when I found the town to set it in, I began. The town, Chiatura, is mine complex. No one lives there. It’s just mines. The workers live in the hills around it and come in on a cable car that was last renovated by Stalin. They come to work and then they leave. It is a town where anything can happen.You do not know what happens in their homes and in their private lives, but going into the mines is dangerous. It is very difficult to astonish these people. They are very kind but face fear and obstacles all the time. Mining is the only job they can have.
Don’t the young people leave? Yes only about 40% remain to become miners.
I read that the Christianity in Georgia began through the ministry of a woman named Saint Nino during the 4th century, and it is one of the oldest church communities in the world. Are the people religious today?
It is very difficult to touch on religious themes in Georgia. The religion is Georgian Orthodox. The people censure themselves and ask the priest if they should undertake something different, or if they have doubts about things.
Is it believable that they would take to a living saint as they did in your movie?
I often get this question from people. In my own neighborhood in Tbilisi, there is a living saint with many followers who wait outside of his place to see him at the window. He throws his garbage out the window and the people run to collect it. His followers post videos on Facebook. For example, a childless couple say they conceived after eating the tomatoes he threw out his window. His name is King Nariman and he is on Facebook. If you challenge the followers, they become very aggressive. So yes, I find the story is believable, although it is an imaginary town, even though it was shot in a real town where I previously shot two other films. And the people do have a protector image on the hill, their patron saint, though it was not the one in the film. The place is a microcosm to show how people come to work and leave from work without our knowing where they live. They are always going to or coming from work…as so many of us do today.
What about the characters? They are odd to say the least…
It was very deliberate that I show people as if they were dressed in uniforms. I did not go deep into their characters. It was my decision to shoot in darkness with wide shots to lose the characters and then get close to them after seeing how they behave publicly. Then I would do a close shot with them alone with the saint and their most private thoughts. But that would only be a short sentence reveal.
For instance, Mari who when she is alone with the saint says that he never answered her prayers; she had prayed to him to kill her husband and now she is glad he never listened to her prayers. Except for that, you always see her in a uniform, very uptight, a suit jacket and skirt and high heels, even when she is walking on gravel.
And, credit the great sound designer, Thomas Jaeger, worked with Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, you hear her high heels everywhere. The sound was very important…it was all recreated as were the film’s settings. Only about 20% of it was from real life…I did not make anything near a documentary.
Even the paintings?
Yes the set designer painted the murals that looked so much like social realism of the 30s, but were not. You can actually see some of the characters in the film in the artwork. And the statue of the miner on the cross was his work; he was a sculptor.
How about the music? It was very minimalistic but so deeply moving.
The music took one or two years. I usually do not use music at all in my movies but here I was working with inner sound, like inhaling and exhaling. I used a Georgian folk instrument like a flute. Then an instrument that sounded like an alarm. And a trumpet.
The composer, Tako Jordania, is a therapist for children who undergo ear surgery and need to adapt to hearing voices and sounds and to start talking and pronouncing words for the first time. She also works with children on the autistic spectrum.
How about the actors, how did you find your lead actors?
I knew Mari and Vano and the old couple from my other films and I knew I could trust them to handle any sort of difficulty and still act well. They had to act in very difficult settings, like the mine and I had to trust them to be able to do it. Mari was the lead in Brides. Vano was the lead in Horizon and the old couple was in both Brides and Horizon.
Berdo was the most difficult to find. That is his real name and I changed the character’s name to Berdo. He is really quite young and he transformed himself to look old. He is quite well known as a stage actor.
For the saint I was looking for someone who was a stranger yet local. George Babluani lived half his life in France. Audience may remember him from the film Thirteen. He has a naïve look, he is calm, kind and positive. He lives mostly in Georgia now but goes back and forth to France.
The whole crew played a major part in the film, not just in recreating but in acting as well. Half of the crew is acting in the film. It is crew members that take down the cross and statue. We were all dressed as miners and were in the tunnels as miners. The set designer and we all knew exactly where to point our flashlights and where to aim our head lights on our helmets.
It was very difficult for the DP Krum Rodriguez to shoot these scenes, using our lights for his with a light always at the end of the tunnel. He had to shoot these huge old soviet cars, tracks, the minors.
I shot with non-linear horizons; I used the hills, the giant metallurgical factory in the background, half-lit underground. Even the sound had to come from underground.
You shot during extreme times, the time of COVID.
Yes there was a real threat of death; it was a depressing time and the future unknown. It was during lockdown. We needed special permits to go to work which was allowed between 7am and 9pm.
We did great work, we went to great extremes to make it work. The production designer worked two years on it; he recreated the main square.
The Bulgarian DP was very brave because travel was very restricted and yet he shot with his crew.
You seem to thrive on filming in difficult places. Can you say more about that?
We shot Brides in a prison, it was very claustrophobic and Horizon was shot on a very isolated small island with only one house on it.
How did you find your crew?
The DP had seen my films and we met online until the point of shooting when we met personally on location.
How did you find your partners in production and your cast?
Lasha and I knew established producers in Bulgaria and in France.
Did they finance the film as well?
Yes CNC from France, the Bulgarian Film Center and the Georgian Film Center financed it plus some in-kind from the studios.
And how is the film now playing?
We had a very strong premiere in Karlovy Vary where it won the Ecumenical Award. Its local premier was at the Batumi Film Festival here in Georgia where it won for Best Director and the Audience Award and it went into the cinemas in September. It just finished its theatrical run after playing one month.
INTERNATIONAL TRAILER
https://vimeo.com/artizm/cstrailer?share=copy
Produced by Georgia’s Lasha Khalvashi at Studio Artizm and Tinatin Kajrishvili for Germini. It is a coproduction with France’s Mandra Films and Bulgaria’s Chouchkov Brothers. Sales are being handled by Studio Artizm.
Title — CITIZEN SAINT
Country — Georgia
Director — Tinatin Kajrishvili
Screenwriter — Tinatin Kajrishvili, Basa Janikashvili
Cinematography — Krum Rodriguez
Editor — David Apkhaidze
Production design — George Gordzamashvili
Music: Tako Zhordania
Producer — Tinatin Kajrishvili, Lasha Khalvashi, Studio Artizm
Starring — George Babluani, Levan Berikashvili, Mari Kitia, Gia Burdjanadze, Temiko Tchitchinadze, George Bochorishvili and Lia Abuladze
Director, Scriptwriter, Producer — TINATIN KAJRISHVILI
Tinatin Kajrishvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1978. In 2001 she graduated from the State Theatre and Film University of Georgia with the qualification of Film Director. In 2014 she directed and wrote the screenplay to her first feature film Brides. In 2018 she directed and wrote the screenplay to her second feature Film Horizon.Both films premiered at Berlin International Film Festival. Brides won the Audience Award for Best Picture in the Berlinale Panorama. She is a member of Georgian Filmmakers Union.
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