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Georgian director Ana Urushadze (“Scary Mother”), whose Rotterdam prizewinner “Supporting Role” plays in competition this week at the Sarajevo Film Festival, is prepping her third feature film.
“Fear of Butterflies”
follows a young woman on the cusp of 30 who is “going through some bizarre things, mentally and physically,” Urushadze told Variety. The director described the film, which explores the mordant consequences of a woman “not accepting her body,” as a “detective story with a little bit of mysticism and a touch of body horror.”
The title riffs on Urushadze’s own “severe fear” of the winged insects, which she has harbored from an early age. Recently, she explained, she tried to tackle her phobia with the help of a psychologist friend, who posited the question: If a butterfly was a human being, what would it be like?
“I was like, ‘What kind of question is this?’” the director said, laughing. “But then, weirdly, I knew the answer. I told him a butterfly would be a very sick person, an invalid. Either very ill or handicapped. And he said, ‘That’s it. It’s your fear to be like that.’”
It was an ah-ha moment for the director, an avowed hypochondriac. “Something clicked,” she said — although that hasn’t helped to conquer her phobia.
“Fear of Butterflies” will reunite Urushadze with Estonian producer Ivo Felt’s Tallinn-based shingle Allfilm, a co-producer on “Supporting Role.” With a bitter rift dividing the Georgian film industry, which has witnessed a long-running boycott by many directors, producers, actors and other industry professionals against the state-backed Georgian National Film Center, the director said she’s looking abroad for financing — and isn’t even certain if the film will be made in Georgia. “I’m really open to anything,” she said.
It is a bittersweet prospect for Urushadze, whose much-feted feature debut “Scary Mother,” which won the prize for best first feature at Locarno in 2017 as well as the top honors in Sarajevo, was described by Variety’s Jessica Kiang as “a startling debut that wholly earns its place as standard-bearer for one of the most exciting and distinctive national cinemas to have emerged in recent years.”
For her follow-up, “Supporting Role,” a Tbilisi-set nocturne starring a captivating Dato Bakhtadze, Urushadze follows “a lumbering movie star on a surreal and wryly melancholic soul-search,” as described by Variety’s Beatrice Loayza, praising the “mesmerizing effect” of the director’s moody, meandering drama in a glowing review. It arrives in the main competition in Sarajevo after winning a Special Jury award and the FIPRESCI prize at Rotterdam in January.
“Supporting Role” shares more than just mordant comedy and a growing haul of festival accolades with its predecessor, which tells the story of a middle-aged woman who finds freedom in the act of writing her first novel. It was during the auditions for “Scary Mother” that Urushadze conducted a search for an elderly man to play the role of the protagonist’s father. The search turned sour when one of the actors was put off to discover a young, inexperienced woman sitting in the director’s chair.
The man turned down the role, but gifted Urushadze with an encounter whose “weird tension of young meets old” would provide the spark for “Supporting Role.” The film follows Niaz (Bakhtadze), a once-famous star of Georgian cinema who embarks on a bizarre and fatalistic odyssey of self-transformation, after an unsettling audition with a young female director looking to cast him in a minor part.
Though topical in its exploration of a very contemporary theme — that of a man of faded glories discovering the world has passed him by — “Supporting Role” is above all a riveting character study. Urushadze presents a sympathetic portrait of Niaz, a man who once embodied a certain type of swaggering masculinity but now seems adrift in the modern world.
Inhabiting the role with “tremendous gravitas,” in the words of Loayza, Bakhtadze almost seems born for the part. Yet it was a stroke of luck that brought the actor into Urushadze’s orbit.
“I had three other actors in mind — amazing actors. But things didn’t work out,” the director said. “In the end, there was like one month and a half left [until shooting began], and we didn’t have an actor. It was crazy. Then Dato appeared out of the blue.”
The chemistry between the two was apparent. “It clicked immediately,” Urushadze said, acknowledging now that she “can’t imagine anyone else” playing the part of Niaz.
And despite the film’s premise — and the title’s promise — it didn’t hurt that Bakhtadze still boasts the charisma and screen presence of a leading man. “The camera loves him.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 14 – 21.
