Levan Koguashvili’s “Guria” selected as Georgia’s Oscar submission

Georgia has selected director Levan Koguashvili’s feature film Guria as the country’s submission for the International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture said.

Guria is a tragicomedy about love and friendship set in the impoverished yet gifted and deeply humane region of Guria in western Georgia in the early 1990s.

Despite power shortages, poverty and rampant crime, people continue to fall in love, quarrel, build friendships, sing from time to time and dream. Life goes on and will continue to do so as long as people preserve their humanity.

Guria is a co-production between Georgia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Norway, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia.

On the Georgian side, the film was supported by the Georgian National Film Center, the Ministry of Culture, Creative Georgia, the Georgian Public Broadcaster and Enterprise Georgia.

Levan Koguashvili was born in 1973. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Theatre and Film, but suspended his studies due to the war in Abkhazia and worked as a journalist for the television company Ibervision for two years.

In 1995, he entered the directing department of the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, studying under the renowned Soviet-Georgian filmmaker Marlen Khutsiev. In 2007, he completed a Master's degree in Film at New York University, one of the world's leading film schools.

While studying in New York, Koguashvili directed several short fiction and documentary films exploring the lives of Georgian immigrants in the United States. His graduation film, the documentary Women from Georgia, received widespread critical acclaim and is still regarded as one of the finest works of Georgian documentary cinema.

In 2009, he directed his first feature film, Street Days, which premiered in competition at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. International critics praised it as an outstanding example of contemporary neorealism and hailed it as the beginning of a new wave in Georgian cinema.

His 2013 feature Blind Dates enjoyed major international success, premiering at the Berlin and Toronto International Film Festivals and winning more than 20 awards worldwide.

In 2016, Koguashvili directed the feature-length documentary Gogita's New Life, which premiered in competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

His 2021 feature Brighton 4th won three top awards at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.Guria is Koguashvili's fourth feature film.

“Our film is about ordinary people who, despite living in difficult circumstances, still manage to preserve their humanity. They are far from perfect and often behave badly. Yet they know friendship and compassion. They cry, laugh, shout, fight and love and in our increasingly sterile times, that is no small thing. They live in Guria, one of western Georgia's regions. But in our film, Guria is more than just the name of a place. It is a state of mind. Guria is one of Georgia's poorest regions, yet also one of its most gifted. While people in other parts of the country sing in three-part harmony, in Guria they sing in five parts - or even more when needed. Poverty and hardship are difficult to live through, but for cinema they are a rich source of stories. Yet poverty alone is not enough. A film also needs ‘something else’ - at least for me. That ‘something’ has many names: lightness, lyricism, humour, absurdity and melancholy. Guria possesses all of these in abundance. It is an extraordinary blend of hardship and talent, pain and self-irony, sadness and laughter. For me, Guria is synonymous with my favourite genre: tragicomedy. I wanted to make a film about ordinary people, free from ideological clichés and political agendas. Simple life. Simply cinema. Simply Guria”, Koguashvili said.