Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (2023)

"Etero" (Eka Chavleishvili) runs a curious shop in a small town that only seems to sell soap powder and hair dyes! Anyway, one morning her delivery man "Murman" (Temiko Chichinadze) turns up with thirty boxes of a new washing formula and next thing, well it's taken her forty-eight years! He is married and lives a distance away, but he seems keen to take their new found friendship forward, even though he is to take on a lucrative trucking job in Turkey. She? Well she's always been an independent woman who looks after herself on her own terms - and she likes it that way. Or does she? Is it just what she is used to. As she continues to associate with her judgmental, opinionated and gossiping neighbours, she starts to consider just what her life is all about. Then something quite unexpected happens? That requires a trip to the bright lights of Tbilisi where she feels sure the next stage of her life will begin. It has the nature of a fly-on-the-wall documentary to it. We watch this woman whose life has been one of routine (and frequent thunderstorms) come to challenge a mundane existence that, aside from a perilous experience with some blackberry bushes atop a ravine, is the same from one day to the other. We learn a little of her backstory, of a traditional Georgian family dynamic and though the whole thing is inconclusive, the performance from Chavleishvili is nonetheless engaging and probably emblematic of many middle aged people who have sort of drifted into a limbo that is going nowhere fast. It's worth it all just for the look on her face near the end...