Ushguli

It is wintertime in Ushguli, a small Georgian village perched up on the slopes of the Svantia in the Caucasus… Since the fall of Communism, the tourists have left, money and electricity are lacking and the only road, blocked by snow, is increasingly eroded away by the mountain. Darkness and solitude once more cloak the village and the elders – austere, hardened mountain people who are the sole guardians of an ancestral culture that once united the Svans around a myriad of rites and traditions – dread that Ushguli (« heart without fear ») will soon be little more than a ghost village. The young people, cut off from their roots, are leaving for the town, but what fate awaits them there? Onessime is 84. For three weeks now, he has been waiting for his son Pridon to return from his brother’s in Tbilissi. Pridon had left for the town in a rush after the news that his seventeen-year-old nephew had committed suicide. Onessime has lost his little one, a child he had loved with all his grandfatherly affection.