review of the film The Other Bank by george ovashvili.

George Ovashvili’s The Other Bank follows the journey of a 12-year-old Georgian refugee named Tedo from Navtlugi, a haunting slum on the east side of Tbilisi known to the locals as “Africa,” to Tvarcheli, the village in Abkhazia, where he was born before the war. Tedo and his mother are “Georgian refugees in Georgia,” who fled without Tedo’s father, sick and unable to travel, during the Abkhaz war. Eight years later, they live and “work” on the edge of the Georgian capital, in the old industrial region known for its “secret” production of Soviet MIGs, among petty thieves, criminals, and local cops, who live like parasites off the refugees. Tedo has one severely crossed eye. He doesn’t go to school. He works at a tire repair shop, but becomes increasingly involved in juvenile street crime in an effort to keep his mother off the street. In a society that has always operated on a close “mama-shvili (father-son) relationship, Tedo seems particularly alone. Unable to take care of his mother and increasingly in danger from the local police, he sets off for Tvarcheli in search of his father. His journey, by train, jeep, truck, and foot grows increasingly dangerous, although Ovashvili exhibits great control throughout the film to avoid overstatement, and “calms” the action with a pause at the end of each vignette, or chapter.