BEBIA, À MON SEUL DÉSIR

When her grandmother dies, young Ariadna, a fashion model working abroad, returns to her hometown in Georgia. Alas, instead of simply attending the memorial service, as the youngest member of the family she is obliged to perform an old ritual: she must stretch a thread from the hospital all the way to the coffin, in order to connect her deceased grandmother's body and soul. Ariadna's 25-kilometre-long odyssey is interwoven with scenes of a childhood spent embedded in a seemingly dysfunctional family. This journey back to her roots is staged, portrayed through powerful black-and-white cinematography, while the camera surveys the Georgian landscape in all its beauty. Faces and characters are often depicted in a fragmentary fashion, though it is precisely within these deliberately placed blank spaces that the film finds room for its highly personal aesthetic to unfold. The combination of this idiosyncratic visual language with an atmospheric approach to storytelling lends the film a unique character, deftly imbuing realism with an aura of mysticism.