Farewell, Home Sweet Home

Director: Otar Iosseliani

1999 / 118min / DCP

Perhaps the best-loved of Iosseliani’s French productions and the one that earned him the enormously prestigious Prix Louis Delluc, deliciously deadpan formalist comedy Farewell, Home Sweet Home is another of the director’s ensemble narratives, its seemingly disparate, blackout sketch-style segments slowly revealed to be puzzle pieces that form a panorama of high- and lowlife in contemporary Paris. Among the curious characters who flit by is a dissolute upper-class house husband, played by Iosseliani, content to hole up with a bottle and his electric trains while his wife entertains company—a telling image, as the filmmaker here is something like the engineer of a magnificent model train set, transferring from one narrative line to another in some of the most exquisite tracking shots you will ever see.

Distributor: Les Films du Losange

Part of Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life