Ivo, it soon becomes clear, stayed put after the outbreak of the Georgian-Abkhaz war, though most of his family chose to leave. Played by the magnificent Lembit Ulfsak, a sort of Estonian Laurence Olivier, this older man is Ivo – a stooped, careworn but still dignified carpenter who lives in the rural enclave where the whole story pans out. Will they tear each other part once healed? Or will their host’s clear-eyed pacifism prevail? It’s about three men, the pitch might go: two wounded young fighters, bitter enemies, who are saved and nursed back to health by an older man who refuses to take sides. It’s just a premise, allowing Urushadze to hone the drama down to the lean and hungry shape of a humane, philosophical Spaghetti Western. It’s a lane in one such Estonian-Abkhaz village, a rural arcadia dominated by the citrus fruits of the title, that provides the film with its single location.ĭealt with in a succinct opening caption, what might seem like a challenging ethno-historic background melts away almost immediately. It’s a forgotten detail of that forgotten war: the fact that hundreds of ethnic Estonians who had lived in Abkhazia since the 19 th century were forced to flee to a ‘motherland’ they had never known. His subject is not just a now almost forgotten Caucasian war – the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict that flared up in the summer of 1992 (and continues to simmer). But writer director Urushadze has found a way into the material that extracts universal lessons from a microscopically local flashpoint. It would be wrong to overstate Tangerines’ feelgood factor this is on one level at least a war film with a high body count and an unromantic view of man’s seemingly unlimited appetite for tribal conflict. It’s just a premise, allowing Urushadze to hone the drama down to the lean and hungry shape of a humane, philosophical Spaghetti Western What might seem like a challenging ethno-historic background melts away almost immediately. Released theatrically on 17 April in New York and 24 April in Los Angeles, Tangerines could add a few more territories in the wake of the attention, despite its long shelf life. The icing on the cake came with Samuel Goldwyn’s acquisition of the film for US distribution on the eve of the Oscars. It may not have lifted the big prize, but its inclusion in the shortlist – the first ever for a film from either country – was the culmination of a wave of goodwill that had been building since its debut at the 2013 Warsaw Film Festival. The results are picturesque and anecdotal.The surprise nomination in the best foreign film category at the 2015 Academy Awards, Estonian-Georgian co-production Tangerines is a tense, moving, nuanced anti-war drama. For all the ugliness he depicts-none worse than the ordeal of Dinah, who works as part of a team of prostitutes in a sordid motel room-Baker revels in the power of clichés and the generic energy of his low-fi cinematography, which was done with iPhones. The action is set on Christmas Eve, and Baker leans hard on sad sentiment and cheap irony. While considering the practicalities and degradations of street life as endured by Sin-Dee and her best friend, Alexandra (Mya Taylor), Baker also looks at their johns-in particular, Razmik (Karren Karagulian), an Armenian cabbie who flees his overbearing mother-in-law (Alla Tumanian) for the prostitutes’ company. To make matters worse, the other woman, Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), is everything that Sin-Dee is not-white (like Chester) and physically female from birth-and Sin-Dee careens through town to find her and kick her ass. The director Sean Baker brings empathetic curiosity to the story of Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), a transgender prostitute in Hollywood who, hours after her release from jail, learns that her pimp and boyfriend, Chester (James Ransone), has been unfaithful to her during her twenty-eight-day absence.
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