Sophio Medoidze lives on a small island without streets. She is also increasingly based in her own book.
Working primarily with language (though she keeps saying that), her practice circles what it means to be a foreigner—an activity she pursues with commitment and mistrust.
At 16, someone gave her a second hand camera (Zenith 3, she thinks). This coincided with her country entering a state of collapse (slow, continuous). She kept the camera.
She works with falls and mishaps, with humour and sometimes sadness (negotiable), making films (long, short, and otherwise). She avoids funding applications when possible, preferring to work with friends, and occasionally strangers.
After encountering nomads in Tusheti, she made her first experimental feature Let Us Flow, which travelled more than she did, screening in New York, London, Brussels, Paris, Tbilisi, Norwich, and Khashuri.
She was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in Georgia, and is now working on something else (from a shed).
For her films contact LUX. For her book contact DISTANZ.
“The clash between modernity and tradition is a constant thread in Medoidze’s work, exemplified by the contrast between her slick, fast-cut editing and the archaic traditions of Georgia’s mountainous regions. Her work displays lightness even when dealing with politically charged geographies and patriarchal narratives from which the artist is excluded. Taking both the position of a native and a tourist, Medoidze’s distanced but nuanced approach can be critical and full of empathy at the same time. Whilst the beauty of the Georgian landscape is overwhelming, Medoidze’s taste for the absurd and the self-reflexivity of her address, draw us in and pull us out at the same time.” - María Palacios Cruz (Jackals and Drones, LUX)
“Much of the film’s form and look derives from its subjectivity. Shot over several years, Let Us Flow shows the director, a Georgian native, making her own way through the tight-knit community’s customs, which include not only pilgrimages and horse racing but timed flag-raising and ritualistic sacrifices. Little time is spent establishing bearings; Medoidze rejects ethnographic categorisation or generalisation. Instead, Let Us Flow plays like a personal quest for the director, thanks in large part to her diaristic voiceover; her finger, tracing the outline of mountains or stroking a horse’s wiry mane, creates a distinctive haptic language for the film, an attempt to make ostensibly impenetrable specificities accessible.” - Emily Maskell (Bfi Signt&Sound)
“Her films are animated by a peculiar uncertainty principle which propels the viewer from image to image, abruptly and repeatedly shifting between different layers of reality. Often depicting her native Georgia, Medoidze’s films are mosaics in which scenes of mythic otherworldliness oscillate with documentary details, often small and comic. 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 (Xitana, Tyneside Cinema)
“Much of the film’s form and look derives from its subjectivity. Shot over several years, Let Us Flow shows the director, a Georgian native, making her own way through the tight-knit community’s customs, which include not only pilgrimages and horse racing but timed flag-raising and ritualistic sacrifices. Little time is spent establishing bearings; Medoidze rejects ethnographic categorisation or generalisation. Instead, Let Us Flow plays like a personal quest for the director, thanks in large part to her diaristic voiceover; her finger, tracing the outline of mountains or stroking a horse’s wiry mane, creates a distinctive haptic language for the film, an attempt to make ostensibly impenetrable specificities accessible.” - Emily Maskell (Bfi Signt&Sound)
“Her films are animated by a peculiar uncertainty principle which propels the viewer from image to image, abruptly and repeatedly shifting between different layers of reality. Often depicting her native Georgia, Medoidze’s films are mosaics in which scenes of mythic otherworldliness oscillate with documentary details, often small and comic. 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 (Xitana, Tyneside Cinema)