Teenager Gonga and his transgender cousin Bart stumble upon a suitcase full of rusted crucifixes at a scrap yard. Bart comes up with a plan to convert them into neon crosses and sell them door-to-door to unsuspecting residents of Tbilisi. Their improvised crusade through the city’s outskirts turns into a search for friendship and romantic adventures. This empathetic black comedy celebrates life on the margins and joyfully defies authority. Guided by two bumbling salesmen – one of whom never takes off his The Misfits t-shirt – contemporary Tbilisi reveals itself in a chaotic burst of color, mood, and texture. Through a cast of eccentric, quirky and endearing characters, the film uncovers whimsical micro-worlds of objects and rituals that both embrace and reshape tradition. Visually striking static shots transform scenes of absurd chaos into parodic tableaus of Georgian history and modernity, all set to a soundtrack drawn from Georgia’s underground music scene. In Tbilisi, people sort through the debris of the past daily, turning trash into treasure – and the other way around. While orthodox religion remains a traditional backbone of their lives, for these colorful and defiant outsiders, survival is a ruthless hustle: every object is a potential commodity – poverty and capitalism strip sacred symbols of their meaning and turn them into merchandise. The decaying urban landscape becomes a playground of reinvention where identities are fluid, intentions ambiguous, and boundaries between the sacred and profane, urban and rural, individual and collective, are constantly blurred. Although capitalist greed drains the dignity of Tbilisi’s citizens, turning the art of living into a corrupt and hollow game, on the margins, everyone is equal – unconcerned with binary oppositions or power hierarchies. As Bart puts it: “Victory and defeat are two sides of the same coin.” (Dina Pokrajac)
*Screenwriter Irina Jordania will join us for a Q&A after the screening, moderated by film critic Nino Kovačević.
Awards and Festivals:
Locarno Film Festival (2024) – Golden Leopard for Best Film, Youth Jury Award; Asia Pacific Screen Awards (2024) – Best Director; Hainan International Film Festival (2024); goEast Film Festival (2025) – Best Film
Tato Kotetishvili is a Georgian filmmaker born in 1987. He graduated from the Polish National Film School in Łódź and lives in Tbilisi, where he works as a director and cinematographer. His short film Watermelon (2012) won Best Film at the Krakow International Film Festival in 2017. Holy Electricity (2024) is his feature directorial debut.
