And Then There Was Light

Director: Otar Iosseliani

1989 / 105min / DCP

The confrontation of a traditional rural/agrarian culture bound to the land and the cycles of the seasons and an urban/industrial society that has largely forgotten these ties, an abiding concern of Iosseliani’s cinema, plays out against a backdrop entirely new to his work in this fable-like homage to silent cinema, intertitles and all. In the village of Casamance in southern Senegal, home to the Jola people, life goes on much as it has since time immemorial, with its gossip-mongering, its local scandals, its rituals of field labor and midday meals—until, that is, new European machinery begins to arrive on the scene, its intended use: deforestation of the region and exploitation of its natural resources. “There is an interweaving, an interdependence, of real life and ancient poetry… The film’s texture is not raw, not naturalistic. In Africa, as in his native Georgia, [Iosseliani] enters into a kind of symbiosis with the ‘spirit’ of the country.” —Le Monde

Distributor: Les Films du Losange

Part of Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life