House Of Others (2016)

Set in the nineties soon after the Georgian war, this powerful and poignant family drama sparks off as a small family comprising of father Astamur (Zurab Magalashvili), his wife, son and young daughter rattles up a rainy hillside in rural Georgia in a jeep with a cracked windshield.

They’re being driven by Ginger (Malkhaz Jorbenadze), a shady opportunist profiting by relocating families to a remote village abandoned by its inhabitants as the conflict approached. The mother, Liza (Olga Dykhovichnaya), looks out with a pinched and anxious face, clutching her daughter to her as Ginger extols the virtues of their new home: the beauty of the landscape and the sweetness of the thin-skinned tangerines that grow in abundance all around.

Their arrival, to a house full of the previous occupant’s furniture, is observed through binoculars by Ira (the striking Salome Demuria), a woman of militaristic bearing who lives in a bigger house higher up the hill with her widowed sister Azida (Ia Sukhitashvili) and her teenage niece Nata (Ekaterine Japaridze).

They are the new arrivals’ only neighbors, but while Nata and the boy Leo (Sandro Khundadze) will become playmates the man-hating Ira, who still practices arcane military drills and can shoot a tangerine off a faraway tree branch, remains hostile and hawklike. How will the family adapt to life in a house filled with the agonising memories of strangers? How will the terrors of the war affect the new neighbourhood and its psyche as a whole?