For an independent film, nothing screams street-cred louder than a gong from the Sundance Film Festival.
Georgian father and son filmmaking team, Temur and Gela Babuani, are two such filmmakers lucky enough to have received such an honour with their new film, Legacy.
Recently in the UK for the Edinburgh Film Festival, the filmmaking duo has been riding the crest of rave reviews for their film, which tackles the prickly issue of ancient blood feuds in Georgia with dazzling simplicity.
The film follows three French travellers on a spur-of-the-moment visit to once war-torn Georgia. One of the group has just inherited a castle but their seemingly straightforward journey goes awry the moment they arrive in Tbilissi.
Befriending a taciturn interpreter the trio set off on a two-day bus ride in the mountains, only to meet a particularly gloomy grandson and grandfather who board the bus carrying an empty coffin.
The relatively affluent French travellers are stunned to discover, as they slowly befriend this pair, that ancient blood feuds so seemingly absent in western society, still exist in the Georgian mountains.
Even more stunning is the realisation that the settling of old scores is accepted by locals and police alike.
This clash of values and cultures is delicately handled by the Babluanis and has propelled them onto the festival circuit.
Director Gela Babluani, made his first splash on the festival circuit with his debut feature, 13 (‘Tzameti’) which won the World Cinema Dramatic Prize at the Sundance Festival in 2006, as well as prizes in Venice and his native Georgian, Tbilissi International Film Festival.
No stranger, then, to the Film Festival circuit, Babluani, raised in Georgia and now living in France, developed an interest in filmmaking at a young age. “My mother tried really hard to get me to take up music, but people thought I had a hole in my ear – I got held back two years”, he says.
Perhaps inspired by his father, who produced films in Georgia all his life, Gela then attended film school. But the experience left him uninspired. “You can learn the basics of filmmaking, but it’s all about passion. You can’t be taught that,” he says.
The war in Georgia forced Gela to move to Paris at the age of 17, and he now finds himself in the US, working on English language remake of his indie-hit 13. Being so far from home from such a young age engendered strong views on his native country, and for this reason, he believes the experience of going back to his homeland to make Legacy was inevitable.
Filming was certainly a family affair.
Teaming up with his veteran filmmaker father, Temur, Gela undertook casting only to find that his brother, Georges Babluani, was the best person for one of the lead roles. “It wasn’t an issue of budget,” he said. “We had no budget and we shot the film in 20 days. It’s just that when we cast, there turned out to be no person better suited to the role emotionally than my brother. He was just that character.”
His brother has one of the key emotional roles in the film, playing the grandson escorting his grandfather to an enemy village to settle old scores.
Gela also cast Georges in his earlier film, 13 and used his mother and sister in the cast. To add authenticity to the film, Babluani, following in the vein of English directors such as Ken Loach, frequently casts non-professional actors in the lead roles.
This added authenticity was one of the many features that appealed to Revolver, Legacy’s UK distributor and one of Babluani’s greatest champions.
“We were attracted by the fact that he used non-professionals,” Giorgia Lo Savio at Revolver said. “Some of the stories Gela told us about these people were just extraordinary. They’d been through war, through shootings – real hardship.”
But did Revolver consider a film about ancient Georgian blood feuds something of a commercial risk?
“There’s always risk for independent distributors,” Lo Savio said. “Even distributors like Icon and Optimum are financially backed, but we aren’t so cushioned.”
“The key was that we saw 13 in Cannes last year – and after viewing 20 minutes of rushes we were hooked.”
Babluani’s talent was obvious to the distribution company who immediately negotiated an early pre-buy based on their excitement over ‘
13’s potential.
“Since then we’ve kept a strong relationship with Babluani, and when we saw the script for Legacy, we immediately saw its potential.”
So how did Legacy and 13 gain attention in an overcrowded independent market?
“The thing is that independent films do so often get lost. A week later, people are like, what was that one again? But Babluani has such an original perspective – an original voice – that we were confident we could distribute the film and do it justice.”
“His storylines are simple and strong, and he develops such rich characters,” Lo Savio said. “He’s the kind of talent we’re willing to take a risk on to nourish.”