TBILISI (Georgia) 

Workshop:  01 - 16.07.2013  

Tutors: Paweł Łoziński, Wojciech Staroń, Rafał Listopad

Partners:  Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgian State University, Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management (GIPA), Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Tbilisi 

Workshops took place at the Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgian State University (TAFU), which we had visited in June this year from 1-16 July 2013. The workshops’ participants were mainly students from the university, chiefly from the directing and editing faculties, but also journalists from the Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management, who are specialised in finding interesting subjects. The tutors during the workshops were: Pawel Łoziński, who took overall responsibility, Wojciech Staroń who was in charge of the cinematographic conception of the short film studies, and Rafal Listopad who advised on issues linked to editing. On the production side the Polish team consisted of: Victoria Ogneva, our production manager; Katarzyna Boniecka who was responsible for editing film material; and Marcin Ściegliński as the technical and cinematographic consultant. On the Georgian side two TAFU professors supervised the project. They were: Otar Litanishvili and Dato Janelidze, the Dean of the Cinematography Faculty. They freely admitted that their role was to take care that the Polish tutors had a totally free hand in carrying out the workshops with the Georgian students. As the tutors stressed, the classes were remarkable owing to the students’ incredible mobility. They were here, there and everywhere, always rushing some whereat full speed doing lots of things at once. It created an atmosphere of energetic turmoil, which was often difficult to harness, but that’s precisely how the local character of the project manifested itself. The subjects of the filming progress emerged spontaneously, and other subjects emerged during the documentation. A camera followed the work of an ambulance crew, which plays a slightly different role in Georgia than it does in Poland, and also documented a taxi driver’s working day, entered the homes of refugees from Southern Ossetia, followed the process of becoming accustomed to the reality of the noisy Tbilisi street life during special classes for the blind… Thanks to the cameras viewers will be able to find out what the world is like in the Georgian capital.