Since Otar Left

Since Otar Left | |
| Director: | Bernard Renucci |
| Cast: | Esther Gorintin, Nino Khomasuridze, Dinara Drukarova, Temour Kalandadze, Roussoudan Bolkvadze |
| Screen Writer: | Bernard Renucci |
| Genre: | Drama, Foreign |
It’s incredibly hard to tell someone that their loved one has passed on. When Georgian (as in the former Soviet Republic) doctor Otar suffers a fatal accident while working as an illegal immigrant laborer in Paris, his sister Marina (Nino Khomasuridze) and his niece Ada (Dinara Drukarova) can’t immediately summon the heart to tell his doting mother, Eka (Esther Gorintin). But this initial lack of courage gradually snowballs into a mountainous lie, as Ada and Marina soon find themselves forging letters and even photographs from Otar to quench the elderly Eka’s thirst for news from him. Director Julie Bertucelli honed her chops as assistant director to the late Krzysztof Kieslowski on deux (Blue and White) of his esteemed “Trois Coleurs” films; his ability to milk a simple story for gently escalating emotional impact lives through Bertucelli here. But for all the thoughtful pleasures spun into Otar’s patient narrative, perhaps its greatest gift comes effortlessly, in allowing our eyes to roam around a corner of the world most of us will never see in the flesh, quietly accumulating details about what life there might be like.