The 17-minute puppet stop-motion animation and cut-out animation using hand-crafted sets and miniature architecture is set in 1992, during the final summer before war devastates Sokhumi, and follows a 13-year boy as he discovers a love he has never known before, only to meet him decades later, when he returns to the ruined city, when memory, childhood and loss begin to merge.

This is a nostalgic and painful film for both its director, who spent his childhood summers at the seaside in Abkhazia, and also for its producer, Vladimer Katcharava of 20Steps Productions, who is originally from Sokhumi.

If for the director “the film is not about what was destroyed but about what remains inside of a person after a place is lost”, for the producer “the story is deeply emotional and painful”. “My family suffered greatly during and after the conflict, and many aspects of the story reflect my own childhood”, Vladimer Katcharava told FNE.

“When the war began I was 13, the same age as the boy in the film. For many years, Sokhumi existed in my mind not only as a place, but as a memory: the sea, the streets, the light, childhood friendships, and the feeling of life interrupted. That is why Mamuka Tkeshelashvili’s project felt necessary from the very beginning. It returns to Sokhumi not only through loss, but through the emotional atmosphere of the city before everything changed. Mamuka’s hand-crafted animation gives memory a physical form. Producing this film became, for me, a way of returning to Sokhumi through cinema”, said Vladimer Katcharava said in the production notes.

20Steps Productions produced the film in association with the Georgian Film Academy and Animatory, with support from the Georgian National Film Center, the Ministry of Culture of Georgia, Creative Georgia, the Tbilisi City Hall, and PSP.

Sandro Katamashvili and Lado Chikhradze are the line producers of the film.

The film was made from 2023 to 2026 with a budget of approximately 70,000 EUR, Vladimer Katcharava told FNE. The visual postproduction and the sound postproduction were done in Tbilisi at Caucasian Film Service and Heima Production, respectively.

Vladimer Katcharava always wanted to produce animated films, but started with live-action films as the animation industry was in great pain. “In 2011, while shooting the feature film Keep Smiling by Ruso Chkonia (later screened at Venice Days in 2012), young Georgian animation director Sandro Katamashvili approached me with the idea of a short film, Granny. This was the first animated film that I produced, and it was selected in Hiroshima 2013. After that, we started producing li.le by Natia Nikolashvili. It was a breakthrough because, for the first time a Georgian short was selected for the Berlinale Generation, in 2017.

I met Mamuka Tkeshelashvili with his amazing stop-motion material while he was still working as a gaffer, and together we started creating three shorts: Sunset (2015), Fisherman and the Girl (2018), and When the Sea Was Calm. All of them went to Annecy, and the last one went to Ottawa as well. Recently, we have been in production with IGI , the first Georgian animated film, and all of this proves my point, that you can create a lot of great stories in animation with talented and creative artists, who in Georgia are plenty and undiscovered yet”, Vladimer Katcharava concluded.

Production Information:

Producer:
20Steps Productions (Georgia)

Credits:
Director: Mamuka Tkeshelashvili
Scriptwriter: Mamuka Tkeshelashvili
Editor: Levan Kukhashvili
Props master: David Kobakhidze
VFX supervisor: Vazha (Vako) Agladze
Sound designer / re-recording mixer: Irakli Manchkhashvili
Composer: Betkho