Revitalized Spirit in an Aging Metropolis: Divine Energy and the Burgeoning Georgian Film Industry

In the heart of Tbilisi, Georgia, a unique story unfolds in the debut film of Tato Kotetishvili, "Holy Electricity." The film, showing in theaters throughout August and available with English subtitles, follows two cousins as they stumble upon a suitcase full of metal crosses, convert them into neon crucifixes, and attempt to sell them door-to-door.

The film hovers on the edge of comedy, with the neon crosses having a faintly ridiculous charm that shades into poignancy. The cousins, depicted as vivid, awkward, endearing, and fragile characters, navigate the city's labyrinthine streets, knocking on doors and engaging in sales encounters that inflect with additional social voltage due to one cousin's gender-nonconforming identity.

"Holy Electricity" extends Georgian cinema's reputation for being elliptical, socially astute, and formally daring. Kotetishvili uses non-professional actors and relies heavily on improvisation, resulting in a porous realism where documentary textures bleed into fiction. The film's compositions, cuts, and undercurrent of mordant humor place it closer to a city symphony in fragments than to a road movie.

The city of Tbilisi itself is a third protagonist, with a focus on doorways, alleys, and balconies as thresholds for an endless negotiation between interior and exterior, household and street. Faith, according to the film, thrives on absurdity, with believing in the light of a flickering diode not far from believing in a mystery no eye can see. The neon crosses become a vernacular technology, a plug-and-play sacrament for households where faith competes with utility bills.

The film refuses to moralize, instead showing tenderness in unlikely places, such as the cousins' care for each other, buyers' curiosity, and the city's accommodation of absurdity. Aura migrates from the neon crosses to the relations between characters, such as awkward smiles, fragile dignity, and recognition.

Critics have compared "Holy Electricity" to Paper Moon, but the kinship is partial, with the film belonging to a deadpan European lineage that stretches from Aki Kaurismäki to early Jim Jarmusch. The film restages Walter Benjamin's thesis on aura, with Kotetishvili focusing on the interstices of encounter rather than the objects.

In 2024, "Holy Electricity" premiered at Locarno and won the Golden Leopard for the "Cineasti del presente" competition. The film speaks to a global condition, with sacred forms blending with commercial light across the world, and "Holy Electricity" giving this bricolage a face, a rhythm, and a fragile grace. The film is a reminder that culture is never static, that symbols are never fixed, and that survival itself can be a form of art.

Revitalized Spirit in an Aging Metropolis: Divine Energy and the Burgeoning Georgian Film Industry