LIDF

This was a particularly touching pairing of a short and a feature both with the central themes of displacement. In A Letter Home, an Iranian-American woman, the director Shahrzad Davis, writes to her deceased mother, explaining how she has taken it upon herself to take a spiritual and physical journey to discover her roots. She combined images of her mother in the past, rather as though we were watching a ghost. In The Women From Georgia, groups of surprisingly older women from Eastern state have moved to work illegally to the US in order to send money home, living together in ‘hotels’, really two or three bedroom apartments that are full of beds and often rather far away from their jobs which are mostly caring for the elderly. Some have not seen home for years. As one woman watched a video sent to her by her husband telling her via this modern postcard that she was “the best wife in the world”, it felt rather that she too was communicating with the dead; in a terribly poignant moment she kissed the screen. Levan Koguashvili’s film appeared to move most of the audience, who waited for some time before breaking into a round of applause at the film’s end.