Internat (2015)

The setting is Georgia, twenty years after the ethnic Georgian-Abkhazian conflict that, from 1992 to 1993, bloodied the country already tested by a long civil war. The story takes place in Kutaisi, specifically Internat (college), a former schoolhouse occupied by about sixty families that fled the Georgian war in 1993, from Abkhazia. The protagonists are three brothers, Gia, Gela, and Lado Ugrexelidze and their families. They have been living in Internat for twenty years, building day after day their home, but also a sanctuary of their past life, their native land, and of their childhood memories. The children who grew up in Internat, in turn inherited the same traditions as their fathers, yet found a way to transform them into a game by magnifying the adventures of those war heroes of which their parents narrate. In the Internat, life, death, and love are blurred together in an endless circle that will only be broken when these alienated families return to their home, Abkhazia.