Sarajevo 2024 review: Holy Electricity (Tato Kotetishvili)

“A touching and often bitingly funny dark comedy about the supposed corruption of family values and finding hope in even the bleakest of circumstances.”

In her seminal masterpiece of filmmaking The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda boldly proclaimed herself  “la glaneuse”, someone who finds value in taking waste and discarded materials and reworking them into something more useful, despite the stigma associated with the practice. Her theory was that, despite not being a gleaner in the literal sense, she was instead someone who excavated society, looking for its most marginalized and obscure individuals and focusing on telling their story, using them as the foundation for acts of pure artistic expression. This feels like a logical place to start when discussing Holy Electricity, especially since director Tato Kotetishvili has made such a seemingly unwieldy, ambitious film, finding any angle on which to approach a discussion is a good way to start making sense of this delightful but peculiar curio of a film. The premise is simple enough – a young man who has recently lost his father joins his cousin in frequenting the scrapyard of their working-class Tbilisi neighbourhood, where they are in search of treasure. This comes in the form of a pile of discarded crosses, which the duo see as the perfect opportunity to appeal to both the fiercely religious population of their city, and those with a penchant for the more extravagant who appreciate these tacky novelties. In the process, the director uses this charming fable to explore deeper themes, painting a vivid portrait of contemporary Georgia, a country that has been severely under-discussed when it comes to arts and culture outside of the region but has gradually started to have its voice amplified with such engaging, poetic works of art.

The most appropriate description for Holy Electricity is not as a single coherent story, but a stream of scenes loosely structured around the characters of Gonga and Bart, two exceptionally entertaining characters who are written with great affection. Some moments focus on their exploits, whereas others see new characters introduced or drawn into the foreground after sitting on the periphery for the majority of the film. Thematically this allows for a rich and evocative approach to storytelling, since the director is cobbling the film together scene-by-scene, seemingly a direct attempt at subverting the concept of the broader image when it comes to filmmaking. It’s in these dozens of moments, each one a short and compact story on its own, that the underlying thematic content gradually begins to emerge. It reveals this film to have many different narrative strands – family is perhaps the cornerstone, with nearly every interaction between characters having something to do with family bonds or connections, even if only in the most tenuous sense. Additionally we find themes such as teenage romance (with the third act being almost entirely a coming-of-age drama peppered with hilarious diversions), trauma and even a slight touch of queer issues forming the foundation for the film, which all serve to create a beautiful and subversive picture of Georgia and its people. Kotetishvili is adamant in his desire to create a film that somehow condensed the entire national spirit into a singular narrative – it’s an ambitious order, and one that may work better in some moments than others, but the sheer gumption to craft such a film immediately gives us a clear sense of the director’s vision and precisely what he aimed to achieve with this sprawling Balkan odyssey.

What is perhaps most surprising about Holy Electricity is that Kotetishvili is making his feature-length debut with this film, which would be hard to detect without prior knowledge since this film seems to show him springing almost fully formed in terms of possessing a strong directorial vision and a clear set of technical skills that are well-utilized in telling a rambling but fascinating story. In a series of loosely connected vignettes, each one only lasting a minute or two (with the exception of a couple of longer scenes that are the core of the story), Kotetishvili draws our attention to Georgia and its people. He uses many locals and unknown actors as the stars of his film knowing that they bring a level of authenticity that could not be found elsewhere, and give fascinating insights into the country and its history existing within every one of the characters. There are a few moments where one could argue that Holy Electricity is over-directed, with the constant flurry of bright colours and stark compositions making it seem as if the director wants us to take notice of his prowess, but he easily compensates by showing that this is not a hollow gesture but rather his attempt to present a different side of a common set of tropes that would be cumbersome had he not approached these ideas with a sense of humour and the desire to present something entirely different. The use of music, which alternates between hauntingly somber and outrageously upbeat, coupled with the rambunctious use of visual imagery makes Holy Electricity an artistically resonant film, albeit one that does have enough substance to earn this level of peculiarity and deviation from the artist status quo.   

Over the past few years Georgian cinema has become increasingly prominent on the global stage, and the reasons are not difficult to discern – unconventional in a way that feels genuinely original, while also having a kind of rickety charm that makes the films extremely endearing, especially in revealing more idiosyncratic aspects of the country and its people. Bold and uncompromising in its vision, and indicative of the birth of a very promising young filmmaker, Holy Electricity offers us unique insights through a touching and often bitingly funny dark comedy about the supposed corruption of family values and finding hope in even the bleakest of circumstances, filtering it all through a heartfelt story of a young man growing up to realize that he does not need to accept the life he has been given. Much like the crosses he and Bart scavenge from the scrapyard, he is taken for granted and viewed as discarded waste that seemingly no one finds valuable – until he becomes the raw material for something unconventional but practical. There are many ideas that we do wish that Kotetishvili could have explored more, especially those centering around trans issues (which prove to be a far more important plot component than the early throwaway jokes may suggest) and the trials and tribulations of the working class, represented in the rogue’s gallery of delightful eccentrics that populate the film. However, taken for what it is and the message that it ultimately chooses to prioritize, it is difficult to find fault in how the director approaches these multitudes of themes, shaping a decidedly unusual work from the most unexpected of materials.