Corn Island

The Inguri River draws the de facto border between Georgia and Abkhazia. One of the spring floods leaves a small island in midstream. An old farmer decides this ground will grow corn and settles there with his granddaughter: a hut goes up, seed goes in, the crop is waited for. On both banks, soldiers patrol. Giorgi Ovashvili's film proceeds almost without dialogue. It shows the work of one season step by step and lets politics into the frame without ever discussing it: boats passing, sounds carried from a distance, bodies in the water. The island will be gone again in a year, and the film watches a man work the soil knowing that. İlyas Salman leads, with Tamer Levent also in the cast. The film won the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2014 and was Georgia's submission to the Academy Awards. Who it's for: Viewers interested in slow cinema, narratives built on nature and labour, and cinema from the Caucasus. Who it's not for: There is almost no dialogue and the plot amounts to the cycle of a single season. It asks for patience.