Blueberry Dreams review – a gentle, humorous portrait of a Georgian family who start a fruit farm

War is always in the background, but the focus is on a kindly father, his long-suffering wife and young sons struggling to make a profit from working the land

Georgian film-maker Elene Mikaberidze’s first feature-length work is a gentle, sweet-natured and deeply embedded documentary that observes a working-class family over a year and a half as they start a blueberry plantation. The opening text informs us that Soso, father of the family, was originally an engineer but has chosen to pack in his profession and take up farming partly because the Georgian government is offering attractive credit incentives, particularly for those who work the land near the border with Abkhazia, once part of Georgia but effectively a puppet state of Russia since the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.

The film starts tracking the family from April 2021, so war is very much on the minds of everyone here, even Soso’s irrepressible 10-year-old son, Lazare, who proudly shows off his pictures of soldiers and explosions in a school art show. Elsewhere, Lazare, his older brother, Giorgi, and another kid chat about the region’s politics and history after a Christmas-meal, speculating on how great it would have been if the Germans had killed Putin’s mother during the second world war.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/N9zJr0X