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Locarno Prizewinner Holy Electricity Drops Trailer, Director Tato Kotetishvili Teases Ne

Georgian filmmaker Tato Kotetishvili, whose feature directorial debut, “Holy Electricity,” won the Golden Leopard in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente section at the recently wrapped Locarno Film Festival, is prepping his next film, a docufiction that follows a family trying to illegally enter the U.S. from across the Mexican border.

The director also released a trailer for his prize-winning debut, which plays this week in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Variety has been given exclusive access below.

The untitled project from the cinematographer-turned-director traces the odyssey of a Georgian family trying to make it to America via an arduous, three-week journey across Latin America. The family’s first trip overseas, it will be seen through the eyes of a child “who is not really concerned with the problems of the past or the anxieties of the future,” said Kotetishvili.

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The film, which reunites the director with producer Tekla Machavariani of Tbilisi-based Nushi Film, is sure to get a boost following the Georgian’s award-winning turn in Locarno. Directed and lensed by Kotetishvili, who co-wrote the script with Irine Jordania and Nutsa Tsikaridze, “Holy Electricity” played to a series of sold-out screenings at the prestigious Swiss fest. Pic is produced by Kotetishvili and Machavariani and co-produced by Ineke Smits, Ineke Kanters, Lisette Kelder, Guka Rcheulishvili and Marisha Urushadze for GoGoFilm, The Film Kitchen and Arrebato Films.

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Here’s an exclusive look at the trailer:

“Holy Electricity” follows a pair of hapless cousins who find a suitcase full of rusty crosses in a scrapyard and decide to turn them into neon crucifixes, selling them door-to-door to the gullible faithful of Tbilisi. A freewheeling, episodic narrative whose artfully composed frames richly capture the comedy and pathos of everyday life, the film is as much about the cousins’ quest to pay off a gambling debt as it is a portrait of and ode to the people of the Georgian capital.

Speaking to Variety from Tbilisi during a brief stopover between Locarno and Sarajevo, Kotetishvili said the film drew heavily on his own peripatetic life and career, which frequently finds him traveling to the far fringes of his hometown. “It’s very much connected. Wherever I go, I’m interested in places, people,” he said. “Every time I’m looking for characters and locations. Sometimes, the locations themselves give me the possibility [to shoot]. I follow my heart, my intuition.”

Largely improvised, using a cast of mostly non-professional actors, “Holy Electricity” showcases Kotetishvili’s instinct for discovering unconventional talent, a regular feature of his short films. The director said that working with non-professionals offers him a chance to cast people who so fully inhabit their roles “that they wouldn’t have to act, but could simply live in front of the camera.”

Co-stars Nikolo Ghviniashvili (Bart) and Nika Gongadze (Gonga) arrived in the director’s lap as if by fate. Kotetishvili met Ghviniashvili while working as cinematographer on a short documentary about Tbilisi’s LGBTQ community and immediately “recognized his talent”; the director cast him in the role of Bart, a trans man and junk dealer who spends his nights sleeping in a beat-up car and his days hustling on the streets of Tbilisi, anxious to both get ahead and out of hock.

Gongadze, meanwhile, cut a striking figure in a separate documentary being edited by the director’s friend. A tall, lanky teenager who studied clarinet in a music conservatory by day and let loose in punk rock clubs by night, he instantly struck Kotetishvili as someone who “could bring a lot to the movie.” As Gonga, who loses his father at the film’s outset, the first-time actor charts a meandering course through “Holy Electricity” with his meditations on life’s mysteries and his pursuit of fleeting loves.

The two actors’ mismatched physical presence on screen blossomed into a natural chemistry that lends “Holy Electricity” its considerable charm. So, too, does the eccentric cast of Tbilisi natives who Kotetishvili described as “not just background…[but] an essential part of the film.”

Filmed, in many cases, in their actual homes, the inhabitants reveal a city steeped not just in the extreme religiosity embodied in its ubiquitous neon crosses — a faith on which Bart and Gonga are eager to cash in — but in the hopes, squabbles and family ties of individuals who, like Kotetishvili, march to the beat of their own drum.

The director now looks to become the fourth Georgian filmmaker to take home the top honors in Sarajevo, following last year’s best feature winner, Elene Naveriani’s “Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry.”

“I think the connection between Sarajevo and Georgian cinema is in people and their history of struggle and finding their own identity,” said Kotetishvili.

The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 16 – 23.

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