Chasing Butterflies

Director: Otar Iosseliani

1992 / 115min / DCP

In the French countryside, in a chateau that’s arrived at a state of genteel decay, two eccentric old women live, as they have for years, practicing the nearly forgotten rituals of the prewar haute bourgeoisie, surrounded by beautiful, dusty relics of a bygone era—a stasis soon to be interrupted by a funeral and the arrival of two heirs eager to turn the property into a profit. An intricate network narrative, like Iosseliani’s Pastorale or Favorites of the Moon, Chasing Butterflies is as much about a way of life—or, more accurately, ways of life—as it is about individuals, an elegiac but clear-eyed depiction of a faded, wilting tradition, absurd and touching, about to be blown away by the stiff winds of contemporary capitalism.

Distributor: Les Films du Losange

Part of Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life