Otar Iosseliani

Otar Iosseliani was born in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, in 1934. After studying music and science at the Moscow State University, he enrolled at the VGIK, the Soviet Union’s national film school, where he directed his first film, Watercolour, in 1962. His first feature film, Falling Leaves, was presented at the Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival in 1968. His second feature, Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird, was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight in 1974. In 1982, faced with increasing difficulties distributing his films in the Soviet Union, Iosseliani settled and worked in France. He gave Mathieu Amalric his first screen role in Favorites of the Moon, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival. His later works include Farewell, Home Sweet Home (1999) and Monday Morning, which received the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2001. His final feature, Winter Song, was released in 2015. It received the Special Jury Prize at the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival and was selected for the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival. Iosseliani died in Tbilisi in December 2023. Describing himself as the author of “abstract comedies,” Iosseliani developed a cinema of observation in which gestures, movements, and everyday situations reveal the absurdities of the human condition with wit and subtlety. Free from conventional narrative structures, his work is often compared to that of Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, and Luis Buñuel.