Filmmaker Ineke Smits shows how the war in Abkhazia has left ruins everywhere ★★★★☆

A badly battered paradise, that is how Abkhazia emerges in Little Man, Time and the Troubadour† Again and again the documentary marvels at the subtropical landscape of the former Soviet republic, which broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s after a bloody war and since then has only been recognized as an official country by a few states, including Russia.

Filmmaker Ineke Smits ignores the complex background of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, but she does show how the war has left ruins everywhere. The capital Sukhumi is full of decayed buildings without roofs and windows, which are slowly being taken over by nature, and which are filmed by cameraman Piotr Rosolowski with a certain blur: a confusing effect, as if you are looking at models, or at a landscape that is half hangs out of time. The images also come eerily close to the actuality of the Ukrainian war, as the entire film (made in 2019) does.

The alienating shots of the ruins fit in well with the itinerant micro theater piece by artist Sipa Labakhua that is central to the film, and which Smits developed together with him. Labakhua’s father was a political idealist who fled to Moscow with his family in the early 1990s. He could not settle there, after which he returned to his native soil. Now Labakhua is traveling through Abkhazia to share this history with people. In a puppet-like arrangement, he animates old photos of his father and shows how he tries to reconcile himself with the monstrous figure of Time. Striking scenes, which Smits continually enlarges in her documentary into dreamy-poetic films.

Labakhua always talks to his audience, and actually Smits (magonia† The Aviator of Kazbek† Stand by Your President) the same. In this way we get to know a few women who remember how Abkhazians, Georgians and Armenians once lived together in their neighbourhood. A young Russian family creates their own dream place and an old Syrian writer tells how he lost his precious manuscripts when he arrived in Abkhazia as a refugee. Pleasantly, with a slight melancholy, the film meanders from perspective to perspective, in which all kinds of questions arise, even if only in your own head: where is the boundary between patriotism and nationalism? What is a country, and why do borders have to be fought for? And what if the weapons are silenced?

Labakhua does not pretend to know the answer to such questions, and neither does Smit. But she does create room for reflection, in a film that, despite all the hopelessness, still makes you a bit in love with this country – or whatever you have to call it.