Salt for Svanetia

In one of the most remote regions of the Georgian Caucasus, Svanetia, isolation helped to preserve the autonomy of its people, but at the expense of unacceptable difficulties during the new Soviet period. Kalatozov is a film-maker averse to traditional ways, and he “turned a proto-realist-socialist tale into an expression of the classical philosophical notion of the ‘dynamic sublime’ related to Nature and human existence” (Sergei Kapterev).