Der Morgen im Kiefernwald

The experimental film DER MORGEN IM KIEFERNWALD (original title: Утро в сосновом лесу / დილა ფიჭვის ტყეში) centres on an elderly woman losing her sight. From the protagonist's personal perspective, the audience experiences the gradual disappearance of vision and the increasing emergence of images from memory. Changes in image, perception and the relationship between time and place—together with slow camera movements modelled on the protagonist's own—blur the boundary between reality and illusion not only for her, but for the viewer as well.

The film approaches the physical process of blindness from within. We perceive the protagonist's world through her eyes, including every deterioration they undergo over the course of the film. The camera image blinks like a human eye; stains slowly appear on the lens, more and more information vanishes from the frame, and by the end the image is almost entirely black.

The soundtrack likewise follows the protagonist's auditory perception. Sounds help her—and therefore the audience—to assign the altered images to a reality. The four seasons, which divide the film into four scenes, reach her through characteristic noises entering the windows. Children shouting as they play in the courtyard and brief conversations with visitors offer clues about the country in which she lives. In the course of the film, a television commentary tells us of armed conflict in the Caucasus. By this point, the protagonist can perceive little more than contrasts of light and dark. Geopolitical change forces her to leave her home in the North Caucasus, Russia, and move to the South Caucasus, Georgia. Nearly blind in her new home, the visual traces of the place she has left remain clearer in her eyes than her perception of the place before her. Real visual impulses collide with remembered images of home. The memory of Ivan Shishkin's painting “Morning in a Pine Forest” appears with particular force. Image and sound no longer correspond; barely visible reality merges with vividly seen illusion.