Eti Tsicko’s Nandauri is an atmospheric, offbeat movie about traditional Georgian culture and how it perpetuates a repressive and sexist system. It’s told through the story of a bold woman who managed to escape her stifling rural village, only to find herself drawn back into the culture she thought she had left behind for good.
While Dover Koshashvili’s iconic film, Late Marriage (2001), examined how Georgian immigrants to Israel tried to keep their traditions alive in their new home, it was told from the point of view of a young man and had a darkly comic tone. But Nandauri, which is named for a Georgian word that means “The one I long for,” is a far darker film, and shows that from a female perspective back in the old country, the picture is even bleaker.
Neta Riskin, who played Giti in Shtisel, is not Georgian herself, but learned the language to play the role of Marina. Marina left rural Georgia as a child and became a lawyer in Tel Aviv. She reluctantly returns to her village as an adult to help a client, Nino, also an immigrant to Israel, who left her son behind.
Nino wants the boy, who is around 11, to move to Israel, but Nino’s brother, Dato (Roland Okropiridze), who has raised him, makes it clear he is not willing to part with the child without a fight. Marina has to win Dato over while dealing with a hostile and antiquated bureaucracy.
Far more psychologically complex than its outline
This is the basic plot, but this movie tells a story that is far more psychologically complex than this outline indicates. It opens as Marina arrives in this snowy village. She is a petite, self-assured woman in a pomegranate-colored coat that stands out against the black and gray of the mountains.
Almost like in a Western, she heads for the local pub, where the mostly male clientele try to size her up, and Dato tries to hit on her right away. Eventually, the two take a trip to Tbilisi together to retrieve a copy of the boy’s birth certificate.
This road trip is the heart of the movie. Dato is a hard-drinking, crude man, but he has done the right thing for his nephew. He loves the boy and wants to stay close to him, but he also knows that in Israel, this child can have a better life.
While Dato deals with his conflicts over Marina’s demand, Marina is facing conflicts of her own. There is no sentimentality in this story – it opens with a very violent prologue in which her father kills her dog before the family heads to Israel – and she finds herself revolted by the primitivity of this region, where women are still forced into marriage.
At the same time, she is attracted to Dato, and their sexual chemistry builds during the long, complicated trip. There are some funny and sexy moments on this journey, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong as they make their way to an office to plead with the bureaucrats. This long road sequence gives a good sense of how difficult even the simplest tasks can be for the rural poor, and shows even more starkly why Marina is glad she got away.
At times, as Nandauri details how poorly Georgian women are treated, it risks becoming the kind of film where everything is black and white. But through the character of Dato, who has reacted to circumstances by becoming a nurturing caregiver to his nephew, the film shows that not all men are thoroughly evil.
Tsicko, who is from a Georgian family and who drew on her background to make the movie, tells a compelling story in her debut film, for which she won the Best Director Ophir this year. The two lead performances are extraordinary. Riskin projects Mariana’s intensity and determination, but also shows other sides of her, including her loneliness and her anger at a society where she had to fight to be anything more than a wife. It was no surprise when Riskin won the Ophir Award for Best Actress for her performance. Roland Okropiridze has a great presence; he makes a character who could easily have been utterly unsympathetic into someone we come to care about.
The film is greatly enhanced by the brilliant, evocative cinematography by Shai Goldman, one of Israel’s finest directors of photography. Goldman is a three-time Ophir Award winner, and this year alone, he was nominated three times in the Best Cinematography category, for Nandauri, Yes, and The Sea. His images in Nandauri often show Marina in her bright coat against drab backgrounds, which adds to the sense of place and character.
I saw this film at the Jerusalem Film Festival last summer, where it won an award for Best Debut Film. Although it has been months since then, many scenes and images stand out as vividly as if I had seen the movie yesterday. That’s a tribute to the quality of this film, which tells a very particular story of Georgia and Israel so well that it will appeal to audiences everywhere.