Salt for Svanetia

A community living high in the Caucasus, in Svaneti, cut off from the roads. The film shows their life: snow, stone towers, animals, and at the centre of everything an absence. There is no salt. People and animals are hungry enough for it to go after anything carrying sweat. The film is not interested in folkloric beauty. It is interested in scarcity: it does not introduce a region, it shows how the lack of a single substance shapes an entire way of living. The form sits at the most aggressive end of silent cinema. Mikhail Kalatozov lays the camera on the ground, shoots from steep angles, and gets close enough to deform faces. This is the early period of the director who would later make The Cranes Are Flying and I Am Cuba, and the appetite for a moving camera in those films is visible here. Although presented as documentary, some scenes are staged, and the film closes on a propaganda ending offering Soviet road-building as the solution, a passage that sits on the rest like something glued on. Who it is for: viewers curious about silent documentary and the Soviet montage tradition. Who it is not for: anyone unable to watch violence towards animals. The film censors nothing about death and slaughter.