by Emily Maskell for Sight and Sound, British Film Institute
Let Us Flow review – a breathtaking documentary about gender and tradition
by James Hanton, OUTTAKE
‘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.’
by 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.’
by Mike Sperlinger about Xitana, Projections Commission
‘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.’
by Guy Mackinnon-Little for TANK Magazine
