Chasing Butterflies

Two old women live in a chateau in France. The house has gone worn, the routine is slow and the days resemble one another. When one of the women dies the property passes to her sister, who lives in Moscow. The sister takes the chateau over but cannot hold on to it for long. Before long it ends up in the hands of Japanese businessmen. The film does not tell that change of hands as a disaster; it watches from a calm, wry distance. Otar Iosseliani takes up the quiet ending of a way of living. Narda Blanchet and Pierette Pompom Bailhache appear in his hundred and seventeen minute film, a coproduction of France, Italy and Germany, completed in 1992.