An invitation to the Mestia International Short & Mountain Film Festival took our film critic away from the familiar circuit of European premieres and into Georgia's high Svaneti, a region of medieval towers, legendary climbers and tables that dissolve into song. What she found was less a festival than a place that refuses to be consumed quickly.
After Cannes, Berlin and Venice, and especially if, as a film critic, you travel to a dozen festivals a year, you start developing an appetite for the unfamiliar. You want something, forgive the word, more exotic.
I use the word reluctantly. To exoticize a place is already to position yourself outside it, turning somebody else's ordinary life into scenery for your own experience. It is the tourist's gaze, and one any culturally curious traveler should learn to distrust. Still, there is another kind of hunger behind it, the desire to discover rather than consume a place, to encounter a culture beyond its postcard landmarks. After enough days moving between airports, press centers and screening rooms, another European festival can feel less like travel than relocating your office for a week.
So when an invitation arrived for a film festival in Mestia, in Georgia's remote northwestern region of Svaneti, my immediate reaction was yes.
I had never been to Mestia. Before the invitation I knew surprisingly little about Svaneti itself, despite growing up in neighboring Armenia. My first association was embarrassingly domestic, Svan salt, the fragrant mixture of salt, garlic and spices familiar throughout our part of the world. I knew Svaneti was mountainous and remote, pressed high into the Greater Caucasus. I knew of the Svans as a distinct Georgian ethnographic group, and that was roughly where my knowledge ended.
I did not know who Mikhail Khergiani was. I could not have told you much about the medieval Svan towers. I had never been interested in mountaineering either, which made the name Mestia International Short & Mountain Film Festival sound almost comically specific, a festival apparently designed for the intersection of short-film devotees and people who voluntarily attach themselves to cliffs. I belonged confidently to only one of those categories. Perhaps that was precisely the attraction.
The road
There are several ways of getting from Tbilisi to Mestia, none quite as effortless as the distance on a map might suggest. There is a small domestic flight, weather permitting, aboard an aircraft tiny enough to make the journey itself part of the story. The alternative is the road, roughly nine or ten hours depending on traffic, weather and, an important variable in Georgia, how many times somebody decides everyone should stop to eat.
We chose the road, leaving Tbilisi at seven in the morning. I spent the first hours half asleep, periodically opening Google Maps to see what names lay ahead. There is something strangely intimate about traveling through a country this way. Before the landscape acquires meaning, it is a sequence of names on a screen, and you look for something you recognize.
For me, the first such name was Surami. It immediately brought cinema back into the landscape. The Surami Fortress is bound to an old Georgian legend about walls that repeatedly collapse until a young man is immured alive inside them, the story Sergei Parajanov transformed into The Legend of Suram Fortress, co-directed with Dodo Abashidze.
For an Armenian traveling through Georgia, Parajanov is perhaps the perfect companion. Calling him simply an Armenian filmmaker or a Georgian filmmaker has always seemed inadequate. Born in Tbilisi to an Armenian family, he made films out of precisely the kind of cultural entanglement that neat national categories struggle to contain. So Surami became my first point of recognition on the road, not because I had been there before, but because Parajanov had.
As the road continued westward we passed through Samegrelo, a region with its own language, food and strong cultural identity, and its principal city, Zugdidi. Then, gradually, the geography changed. The road narrowed, rivers appeared below us, the mountains started closing in. The journey that had begun as a long drive across Georgia increasingly felt like an ascent into another geographical system.
The towers
And then there are the towers. They are impossible to separate from the image of Svaneti. Rising between ordinary houses against the enormous scale of the Caucasus, they make Mestia look, from certain angles, less like a contemporary town than a settlement caught between the Middle Ages and the present. Many of the tower houses date to the medieval period, and they were not decorative monuments but practical domestic and defensive architecture, family compounds in which living quarters stood alongside towers that became places of refuge in times of invasion. It is one thing to learn this from a guidebook and another to wake up with the towers outside your window.
We arrived in Mestia in the evening, just in time for the opening. There was local wine and beer, Svan music, mountains in every direction, and the slightly disorienting feeling of being expected to socialize after ten hours on the road.
The next morning provided a historical foundation. The Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography is compact enough not to prepare you for the density of what it contains. Its collection moves through archaeology, medieval manuscripts, jewelry and weaponry, but its Christian treasury is particularly striking. Among its treasures is the Adishi Gospel, dated to 897, one of the oldest surviving dated Georgian Gospel manuscripts.
For me, as an Armenian, this was simultaneously familiar and foreign. Armenia and Georgia are neighbors, both profoundly shaped by Christianity for centuries, but the Armenian Apostolic and Georgian Orthodox traditions developed distinct visual languages, and inside the museum those differences become physical. I found myself looking at the crosses first, the gold and gilding, the elaborate metalwork, an iconography that felt recognizable without being mine. Traveling between neighboring cultures can produce precisely this sensation. You recognize the grammar while noticing that the accent is completely different.
The museum gave us Svaneti through centuries. The next one gave us almost a single life.
Before this trip, the name Mikhail Khergiani meant nothing to me, which probably says more about my indifference to mountaineering than about his place in twentieth-century sport. Born in Mestia in 1932, he became one of the Soviet Union's legendary climbers, nicknamed the Tiger of the Rocks. He died in 1969, aged only thirty-seven, after a rockfall severed his rope during a climb in the Italian Alps.
His house in Mestia is now a museum, and there is something about small house museums that large national institutions can rarely reproduce. History becomes domestic again. Instead of a masterpiece behind glass, you encounter the accumulation of a life, photographs, clothes, equipment, medals, objects that once had practical uses and have since acquired the solemnity of relics. And here the landscape has not disappeared. You can look from a piece of climbing equipment to the mountains outside and understand, at least spatially, what kind of life required it.
Khergiani was not the only such figure I discovered. One of the festival's presentations was devoted to 4 Stamps - 4 Lives, a book by festival founder and filmmaker Khatuna Khundadze and Ivane Japaridze, built around four remarkable Georgians connected to the mountains. It was a reminder that the mountain in the festival's title is not merely a programming category. The festival is also interested in preserving a cultural memory in which mountaineering, photography, history and national identity overlap.
Among the four was Guram Tikanadze, a photographer and accomplished mountaineer whose name I had not consciously known, although some of his photographs had already reached me. There was the satisfying experience of putting a name to images that existed somewhere in my visual memory. This happened repeatedly in Svaneti. I arrived with embarrassingly large gaps and left with names that sent me searching for more, among them the history of Georgian women in mountaineering. The heroic mythology of mountains, like most heroic mythologies, tends to arrive populated primarily by men. Yet women had been climbing these peaks too, and one of them became a particular discovery for me, unexpectedly motivating. It changed the way I watched some of the films in the following days.
Mountains on screen, mountains outside
Again and again, the festival brought us women climbing. They came from different countries, generations and circumstances, women attempting routes, crossing landscapes, negotiating fear, age, expectation and the limits imposed on them by other people or by themselves. Festival language has made words such as inspiring and empowering almost dangerously easy to use, but here the metaphor was at least refreshingly literal. These women were trying to reach new heights.
The program included documentaries and fiction from different parts of the world, with a noticeable presence of stories from Latin America alongside films from Europe and Asia. There is an obvious temptation for cinema to turn the mountain into metaphor, adversity made geological, self-discovery conveniently waiting at the summit. Some films succumbed more readily than others. But watching them in Mestia changed the experience. You could leave the screening room and find the metaphor still standing outside. For once, the mountains were not a backdrop. They were the context.
The international jury of 2026, comprising Siddiq Barmak, Elif Dağdeviren, Mariam Kandelaki, Guillaume de Seille and Kim Hyung-Koo, awarded the festival's main prizes to Jaar by Phurba Tshering Lama and Girl Climber by Jon Glassberg, while Oh! Mother, Mother by Khatuna Tatuashvili won the short film competition.
And then we eat
Food and the table are inseparable from any experience of the Caucasus. In Svaneti, Georgian hospitality means long wooden tables that somehow accommodate far more people than their dimensions suggest, wine arriving in pitchers with the casual abundance of water, and somebody insisting that you try one more thing when you have already tried everything twice.
Conversation occasionally dissolves, without warning, into song. Georgian polyphonic singing is famous enough to be part of the country's international image, but experiencing it around a table is something else. There is no stage, no introduction, no moment when everyone agrees a performance is about to begin. Somebody starts singing, another voice enters, then another. The song ends, glasses are raised, and dinner continues.
Svaneti is also the kind of place where, at three in the morning, you may find yourself drinking Georgian wine on the terrace of a restaurant that has not officially opened yet, while the chef, a Georgian Armenian, keeps bringing out his fusion dishes for you to try, a local neighbor sits on one side, and a Finnish colleague on the other decides this is the appropriate hour to introduce you to Finnish indie rock. Somehow, in a small town high in the Caucasus, this feels perfectly ordinary.
Perhaps this was what I began to enjoy most about Mestia, the ease with which categories that seem fixed elsewhere become irrelevant. Local and foreign, Georgian and Armenian, work and leisure, festival guest and neighbor, everyone simply ends up at the same table. You might stop at a tiny roadside bakery because someone notices fresh puri coming out hot, and the bread has to be torn apart immediately and eaten while still steaming as everyone continues walking. And while you are doing this, you may have to negotiate the street with a cow. Or a horse. Or several of each. Animals move through central Mestia with the assurance of residents who know perfectly well that the rest of us are the visitors. After a day or two, a cow standing in the middle of the road simply becomes part of the urban infrastructure.
Even cinema has found its own peculiar place in this small ecosystem. Mestia has a tiny movie theater associated almost entirely with one film, Dede, Mariam Khatchvani's 2017 feature set in Svaneti and performed largely in the Svan language. Khatchvani herself is from the Svan village of Ushguli, and years after its release, Dede continues to play. For a critic accustomed to an industry organized around premieres, embargoes and the relentless demand for the next new film, a small cinema repeatedly showing the same local movie feels almost radical. At major festivals, films can become old news within forty-eight hours. In Mestia, a film made almost a decade ago can still be the film playing down the street.
Trying to see a mountain
The problem with spending only a few days in Svaneti is that the region seems almost perversely unwilling to be consumed quickly. There is always another village, another church, another tower, another glacier, another view somebody insists you cannot leave without seeing. You begin with the traveler's ambition to fit everything into an itinerary and eventually realize this is precisely the wrong way to experience the place. Svaneti needs to be digested slowly, rather like the khinkali, which, incidentally, may have been the best I have ever eaten.
One mountain, however, everybody wants to see. Ushba is one of Svaneti's defining peaks, a dramatic double summit rising to around 4,700 meters, notorious among mountaineers for its technical difficulty and unpredictable weather. For everyone else the challenge is considerably less heroic. You simply hope the clouds move away.
Coming from Armenia, I know the ritual well. We do something similar with Ararat, looking toward it, checking the clouds, pointing when the silhouette becomes clear, complaining when it disappears again. Around Ushba I recognized the same instinct. When the clouds finally cooperate, everyone behaves for a moment as if they have personally accomplished something.
Ushba comes with its own love story. According to Svan legend, Ushba and nearby Tetnuldi were lovers who could not be together and were transformed into mountains, condemned, or perhaps blessed, to spend eternity looking at one another across the Caucasus. It is exactly the sort of story mountains seem to attract. Faced with geological time and an object of such disproportionate scale, humans apparently cannot resist giving it heartbreak.
Salt for Svanetia
The festival closed with Mikhail Kalatozov's Salt for Svanetia, made in 1930. I had never seen it before, and watching it for the first time on a big screen in Svaneti felt almost indecently appropriate. The villages, stone towers, slopes and bodies on screen belonged to a world we had spent the previous days physically moving through. Yet the Svaneti of Kalatozov's film was obviously not the Svaneti outside the cinema. It was Svaneti transformed by an extraordinarily forceful cinematic gaze.
The film is both Soviet and Caucasian, ethnographic document and ideological construction. It observes an isolated mountain community while arranging it into a narrative of hardship and backwardness awaiting Soviet modernization, and its ethnographic authority has long been complicated by questions about staging. But whatever one makes of its politics, the images remain startling. Kalatozov, working on the cinematography with Shalva Gegelashvili, photographs Svaneti in extremes. Bodies, stone, sweat, animals, snow, steep diagonals, enormous skies. Viktor Shklovsky's editing gives those images a relentless rhythm, and faces and physical labor become almost sculptural.
Watching the sweating bodies of workers, I found myself thinking of Leni Riefenstahl, not as an influence but almost as a chronological reversal. Kalatozov made Salt for Svanetia six years before Riefenstahl began shooting Olympia. The fascination with physical bodies, labor, strength and movement, the ability of the camera to turn human effort into monumental form, the visual association is difficult to avoid, except that Kalatozov got there first.
For less than an hour, Svaneti was flattened into black and white, cut into rhythm, mythologized and ideologized by a filmmaker nearly a century ago. Then the screening ended. You walked outside. And there were the mountains again, indifferent to what cinema had made of them.
It is tempting, after visiting somewhere for the first time, to speak as though you now know it. Travel writing is particularly guilty of this. Svaneti left me with almost the opposite sensation. I had seen enough to understand how much I had not seen. The best journeys do not necessarily satisfy curiosity. Sometimes they enlarge it. They leave places unfinished.
When I arrived, Svaneti was essentially a name to me, mountains somewhere in the north of neighboring Georgia, Svan salt in my kitchen, a film festival I had never heard of in a town I had never visited. When I left, I still could not claim to know it. But I knew I wanted to return. Not as a complete stranger next time, but as something closer to an old acquaintance, one whose stories I had only just begun to hear.