Thessaloniki Review: Holy Electricity is a Directorial Debut That Finds Substance in Unusual Places

The jump from cinematographer to director doesn’t happen so often. Barry Sonnenfeld, Jan de Bont, Ernest Dickerson––an attractive list, if a short one. The latest to join their rank is Tato Kotetishvili, the Georgian DP behind Uta Beria’s Negative Numbers and Levan Koguashvili’s Blind Dates, now on directing duty with Holy Electricity. The film, part city symphony, part docudrama, offers plenty of style and finds substance in unusual places. Results are compelling, if a little mixed.

It’s a film of real people in somewhat-unreal scenarios, built from precisely composed shots that are often medium, static, and doused with generous color and blunt irony. Take the opening: a shot of a family gathered around an open casket that cuts suddenly to a busted-up car in a scrap yard moments before it’s flattened by a slab of concrete. In the yard, Kotetishvili introduces his low-key, quixotic protagonists: Conga (Nika Gongadze), the son of the casketed man, and his cousin Bart (played by transgender activist Nikolo Ghviniashvili) who promised the deceased to take Conga under his wing. Scavenging the hills of detritus, they find a box full of metal crucifixes and decide to kit one out with LEDs for the man’s grave. When it draws the attention of another mourner, Bart eyes an opportunity and the two men go to work.

Holy Electricity then becomes a film of door-to-door sales, a useful (if underdeveloped) conceit allowing Kotetishvili the freedom to move through his beloved Tiblisi and show a side of the city not often seen in even the recent boom of Georgian cinema. It also allows him to introduce (though “observe” might be the more appropriate term) a selection of its more eccentric inhabitants––among them an instrument collector with a wizard’s beard, a contortionist who pretzels himself into various positions, and two ladies with a shared appreciation for stuffed toys. Bart and Conga haul their wares from one to another, finding a potential love interest for the younger man along the way––a Roma woman named HH––and, more interestingly, finding space for Ghviniashvili, through Bart, to tell his own story (including a reference to the issue of gender identification on passports, a Georgian law that Ghviniashvili is attempting to change with the backing of the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre).

That particular info adds a significant amount of emotional and sociological heft that Kotetishvili’s film doesn’t always match in its meandering nature. (In one jarring moment, the director’s steady hold of the camera slackens considerably as Bart and Congo enter what feels like a music video.) For a first feature that went as far as to win Best Film in the Cineasti del Presente sidebar in Locarno this year, Holy Electricity suggests a thoughtful, stylish filmmaker even as certain moments undermine its otherwise captivating milieus.

Holy Electricity screened at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Grade: C+