‘Let Us Flow: this mesmerising Georgian documentary combines the personal with the mythopoetic. Quietly weaving social critique into its visually arresting study of life in the Tusheti highlands of Georgia, Sophio Medoidze’s first feature marks her out as one to watch in a country whose cinematic output is increasingly admired in the West.’
Emily Maskell for Sight and Sound
‘The endangerment of communal culture by the Internet and tourism underpins Sophio Medoidze’s Xitana, set in Tusheti in Northeast Georgia, a region recently connected to the world by the national government’s implementation of Wi-Fi. The film uses footage of Atengenoba, a traditional festival from which women are largely excluded (and which the artist must therefore shoot from a distance) to consider how progress and progressive principles are at odds with the indigenous cultures that Western tourists (and we can count artists and art audiences among them) are apt to fetishise.’
Ben Eastham for ArtReview
‘No sooner have you been seduced by some seemingly out-of-time setting – an ancient monastery carved out of a cliff-face, a half-glimpsed ossuary – than you are jarred back into a more recognisably contemporary reality by a joke, a glimpse of teenage boredom, some embarrassing tourist behaviour, or an obtrusive drone.’
Mike Sperlinger about Xitana
‘The viewer is placed within a space that can only be grasped through partial moments of contact and resonance. We are engulfed by something at the same time that we are deprived full access to it. In this way, the uncertainty with which we receive Medoidze’s images elicits a sense of intrusion and an unsteady excitement. Like riding a bike with no hands, the work presents a thrilling immediacy that always threatens collapse.’
Guy Mackinnon-Little for TANK Magazine
