The Other Bank

Tedo is twelve. The war in Abkhazia displaced him along with his family, and he now lives in hard conditions with his mother on the edge of Tbilisi. He does not go to school; he works on the street. One day he sets out alone for the place they left behind, to look for his father. The road is long and it lies across the border. Giorgi Ovashvili's Georgian film tells the war not as a front line but through what it left behind. The telling argues nobody's case; it looks through the child's eyes and keeps politics outside. The people met along the road both help him and harm him. The tone is hard and realistic, and it offers no consolation anywhere.