Interview by Maria Vatcharadze
Luka Beradze was interviewed during Kutaisi International Short Film Festival.
Smiling Georgia tells a real story about the presidential project “Smiling Georgia”. In 2012, the president of Georgia promised the elderly residents of the regions a completely free prosthetics procedure. Then, another political group won in the elections, which is why this project was canceled and a certain number of patients were left without not only a prosthesis, but also their own teeth in the middle of the dental care process.
The film is financed by the National Film Center of Georgia and is a Georgian-German co-production. Film director Luka Beradze’s work travels to international film festivals: Karlovy Vary IFF, Montpellier Mediterranean FF and Torino FF.
The work became one of the winners of East Doc Platform, won in the category Cut Thru The Noise; The film was distributed by Silver Doc Caravan; As the project received a special mention at the Lisbon Documentary Film Festival in 2020 and a Jury Special Mention from at the Cinedoc-Tbilisi 2023
Where did the idea for the Smiling Georgia come from?
I learned about this story a few years later, because it was not widely reported. There were videos on social network, but at first, it was not very popular in society. This absurd campaign really caught my attention when I first saw it for the first time. Then I constantly thought about this contradictory story, how this program was conducted, how people allowed it, how they believed – these questions did not leave me.
Therefore, if something doesn’t leave me and I keep thinking about history inside, I constantly have an internal dialogue with a specific story or idea, for me this is already a proof that I want to make a film on this topic.
We started shooting the film at the end of 2019 and we were shooting until 2021, a full 2 years. We used to shoot in different periods of time during the season. We shot four days in winter, four in summer, then in autumn and in spring. We tried to follow the time flow so that the film was not set in one specific time.
With the help of the villagers, we managed to stay until the end in the cold, mud and difficult conditions. The people we were filming were actually posing as part of the film crew. They always welcomed us, there was always support, trust and help.
How did you manage to establish such a warm and friendly relationship with the population; how did you gain their trust after such difficult experience?
It was very difficult to convince them that I was not a journalist, I was a film director and I was going to make a film. I went there for a couple of weeks, constantly talking to the residents of the village, choosing locations, taking photos and preparing material for the camera crew. At first, they didn’t trust me, they were suspicious. After some time, they realized that we did not represent any political party and were not exploiters. In the end, they had absolute trust in us.
The period of two political governmental parties is recorded in the film. The author reflects the reality, although we do not see any bias towards any side. How did you succeed in protecting this limit?
Editing was quite difficult, I worked with Nodo Nozadze and Soso Bliadze for a year. Going right to the edge, we had the previous government’s archive of the program and we had a lot of interviews from that time. To whom we wrote, the stories of all these respondents were related to both the previous government and the current one. I was more interested in what was happening in that moment and how these people felt. Here, the political background came into its own more strongly.
The appearance of the journalist is one of the key moments in the film, how was it decided to shoot this scene?
A year later, we heard that one of the television stations was going to come to this village before the elections, to fix teeth for the people, to film a story and then invite them to the program. We heard this news by accident. I personally contacted this lady, explained to her that I have been making a film about these people for a year and asked to be allowed to attend the show initiated by her. They had four people on their list, I added four more. I asked them to help eight people and insert the promised teeth. The main motivation for me was to get these people the long-promised teeth. Then it happened as it happened: my group and I went down first, set up the cameras and filmed everything.
The film clearly depicts the injustice in the country, it is a satire that exposes the reality with laughter, many of us even shed tears. Apart from the obvious, what exactly was your main point as an author?
The main thing for me was constant search, observation of people and environment, their existence and emotions. It was a search for the essence where a person can be in harmony with his own life on the one hand, and, on the other hand, fall into circumstances where humanity is devalued. These people are used by politicians only for their own benefit, although they still go to the elections, they do not announce a boycott. Also, they do not lose their self-irony. I wanted the utilitarian nature of politicians to appear more clearly, more intensely, amid all this. We were shooting animals: cows, bugs, insects, horses, pigs that behaved like people, like politicians.
