Pastorale

The last film shot in the USSR by Otar Iosseliani, who passed away in 2023. This charming, unassuming story about musicians staying in a village in the Georgian countryside fell foul of the censors. When it was finally screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982, the director decided to defect to the West and tied his life to France.

Pastorale – like all of Iosseliani’s exceptional oeuvre – is impressionistic and sensitive to the absurdities of modernity. The narrative seems to blur in a dreamlike atmosphere, but the director avoids fantasy and idealizing. A summer encounter between city-dwelling members of a string quartet and villagers is a pretext for bittersweet observations. We can tune into the melodies of village life: open-air feasts, neighbourly disputes, singing at harvest time. Someone falls in love, someone steals some bricks. Does classical music “have charms to soothe a savage breast”? Iosseliani is far from naïve, but realizes that such a summer can awaken the desire to want more – as it is for Eduka, the host’s teenage daughter. Don’t miss Pastorale, this screening will be as invigorating as a July storm.

Mariusz Mikliński

Otar Iosseliani (1934–2023) was a Georgian director, screenwriter and actor. He studied at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow and directed his first feature, Falling Leaves, in 1966. It was a success, as was his next feature, Once Lived a Song-thrush (1970), but Pastorale (1975) was held back and only given a limited release. This led to his decision to leave for France in 1982; his later films were critical of the Soviet Union.