The Way Home

The Way Home

1981. USSR. Directed and cowritten by Aleksandr Rekhviashvili. The way home for Aleksandr Rekhviashvili is not charted in the conventional sense. It takes the viewer along some peculiar roads and across a unique landscape: through Georgian history and legend, politics and social stratification, religion and ethics. Allusive, stylized, and allegorical from beginning to end, The Way Home is also in part a tribute to Rekhviashvili's favorite director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and especially to The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966). Together with the short film Nutsa (1971) and the widely acclaimed Georgian Chronicles of the XX Century (1979), The Way Home (completed in 1981, released in 1987) closes a triptych of films that represents Rekhviashvili's poetic contemplation of Georgia's past. It makes extensive use of poems by Bella Akhmadulina (the major female poet of the cultural "Thaw" of the 1950s and 1960s) and of sets by Amir Kakabadze (son of the Georgian avant-garde painter David Kakabadze). In Georgian; English subtitles. 83 min.