RAINDANCE 2024 | Movie Review: "Smiling Georgia"; A Picture Perfect Portrait of A Society In The Aftermath An Atrocity

It’s 2012, and the country of Georgia is preparing for an upcoming election. In the hopes of securing re-election, the incumbent political party promises in one of its flagship policies to heavily subsidise much-needed dental care to the poorest of Georgian society once the governmentship is secured. In the months leading up to the election, medical practitioners begin pulling rotten and decayed teeth from the mouths of voters, ready to be replaced free-of-charge once the election has been won - except the election isn’t won. The opposition take power, leaving hundreds of Georgian citizens without teeth, with no promise in sight for fixing them. This documentary catches up with the victims of the campaign over a decade after the first teeth were pulled, and shares its title with the name of the campaign: Smiling Georgia. 

It’s a wonderfully constructed piece of filmmaking. It’s unobtrusive and gentle, opting to quietly observe the toothless individuals whose lives were played with so carelessly all those years ago. There’s no need for the filmmakers to ham-fist the message - that the poorest of society are always, in every culture, the ones to pay the price for the whims of the rich - because it’s delivered so eloquently by the featured individuals. The film doesn’t linger on the barbarity of what happened to these people, because they themselves haven’t lingered on it. They weren’t able to. They had lives to lead and mouths to feed. They had to just get on with it. Instead, it’s simply a beautifully shot catch-up with the people most affected, and how life for them had no choice but to resume as normal. There’s some effective archival footage deployed of campaign speeches and election rallies, but mostly the tale is told retrospectively by those affected - but even then, they don’t talk about it much. But it’s always present in the film: every time they open their mouths to reveal a toothless grin, we’re reminded why we’re here. 

If anything, the Smiling Georgia campaign is merely a footnote in their personal histories. The film serves as a snapshot of Georgian village society, capturing the community and the joy and the resilience found in its residents. There’s a particularly heart-warming party scene which takes place in a village hall. The camera merely sits in the room and allows the celebration to run its course, with very little interference from the filmmaking crew. It’s a scene which serves as a testament to the privilege of documentary-filmmaking - we’re lucky to be granted a glimpse into the lives of these people. It’s clear that the director, Luka Beradze, built an incredible amount of trust with the village-folk. Indeed, he has since revealed that his bond with the cast is so deep-rooted that he became Godfather to a child born in the village whilst filming took place. 

The beauty of Smiling Georgia lies in its relationships and its people, but it also lies in its cinematography. Each shot is stunningly assembled, lovingly capturing the striking landscape that Georgia offers, and the way that its villages nestle comfortably into the countryside. The shots linger, gratifyingly, for five or ten or fifteen seconds, allowing the eye to hungrily scan the frame for every detail that it offers. It’s an immersive piece of filmmaking, crystal-clear but not over-zealous in its messaging, and the landscape of documentaries is all the richer for Smiling Georgia being a part of it.