Beginning

Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili

2020 / 130min / DCP

Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature makes a literally explosive first impression, opening as it does with the firebombing of Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall outside of Tbilisi, maintaining throughout a disquieting combination of coolly detached observation—each square-framed long shot is composed with an almost eerie precision—and the simmering potential for violence. At the center of the film is Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), wife of the attacked congregation’s preacher and a former actress, doubly vulnerable as a member of a religious minority and as a woman in a brutally patriarchal society, writhing to escape the chains in which she finds herself ensnared at every turn. “Masterful… Rarely has a film made me so painfully, viscerally aware of the impotence of spectatorship.” —The New York Times