Georgia.

Prayer.

Jehovah's Witnesses.

Children punished in the Kingdom Hall.

Participants enter, and while the story of Isaac subjected to a harsh test of faith is being discussed, an arson attack strikes the place, destroying it. While everyone is outside watching the fire, the children continue to play and laugh loudly, including Giorgi, the son of Iana, wife of Davit, the religious leader.

The latter wants to rebuild the Kingdom Hall and reports the attack, but he is asked to delete the security footage of the incident.

Aleks, a supposed police inspector from Tbilisi, visits Iana to ask questions about the fire, continuing with personal and invasive insinuations about the couple's sexuality, putting the woman's resistance to the test as the psychological torture turns physical.

The woman's visit to her mother, a "second-hand woman," and her sister, the recounting of her father's behavior, her relationship with her son, her dedication to the religious cause, the continuous inner conflicts that destabilize Iana's previous choices culminate in the manipulated recording being anonymously played for her husband Davit. This suggests responsibility and manifests indifference to the violence confessed by his wife.

After the baptismal ritual and the questions posed to the children about heaven, hell, good, and evil, the leader invites his wife to move to Tbilisi for a promotion and to start over.

He confesses to her that he wants to forgive her, even though she responds that he will not succeed.

The ending will mirror the beginning in a perfect circularity, where everything comes full circle—story, concept, meaning, metaphor, conflict, religion, and sense—like a seasonal cycle represented by an invasive nature, scenographically the absolute protagonist.

Fixed camera, off-screen, distance: essential elements to focus attention on what is invisible or barely perceptible, to prompt reflection, reconstruction, and identification of the direction the story and a woman's journey are taking, in the parabola of existential emptiness.

Iana acts while nature absorbs the ash in the porosity of its arid and merciless cracks.

A woman wanders, breathing in a nature of woods, water, streams, and rocks, to survive the suffocating impossibility of living what does not belong to her.

A cultural violence to which she cannot physically or verbally resist but which compresses the deceptive reality to which she seems condemned.

Faith begins precisely where reason ends, Kierkegaard used to say.

Faith is paradoxical, as it goes beyond common sense; scandalous and absurd, as it goes beyond logic; and contradictory because it is not a choice.

Iana cannot replace it with the despair of existence, unstable, contradictory, characterized by the necessity and at the same time the impossibility of deciding.

The beginning of the end, from Abraham to Medea, passing through Caché.

From the Bible to Euripides, passing through Haneke.

From heaven to hell, passing through sin, fire, sacrifice, rules, discipline, death.

The conflict between the individual and testimony passes through judgment, exclusion, and condemnation: freedom is not granted without the passport of faith, just as femininity is not without the pass of wife and mother.

Kulumbegashvili accompanies existential disturbance with the annoying electronic sound of Nicolas Jaar, with the noise of nature and the confusion of the rarefied distance of those who want to understand but are not in a position to see.

There is always the unbridgeable gap of truth hidden by representable but never graspable reality.

The static minimalism of the frames is directly proportional to the dynamic and oppressive dialogue of existential transition: Iana rests on oxygenating nature, wants to break free without managing to identify a sense of direction. She knows what she doesn’t want but cannot identify which path to take.

The deafening tone of the inner conflict, contrasted with the indecipherable eroticism of the representation, points to the choice of moving away from the pornographic voyeurism of sight in favor of a sobriety of tempered and controlled gaze.

The stimulation of the senses favors hearing over censored and withdrawn sight, avoiding the commodification that masks the conflict between individual identity and social convention.

Kulumbegashvili does not sell her art to the market; her talent saves her from the ideological conformism inclined toward the cultural industry system: her debut work announces it, her second work confirms it.

30-Sep-2024 by Beatrice