Since 1984, Georgian director Otar Ioselliani has been based in Paris, from where he has continued to make films, his most recent being Adieu, Plancher Des Vaches, in the festival last year. In 1965, he was a graduate of the Soviet film school, VGIK, where he had studied with Alexander Dovzhenko. Avril is one of his earliest and less well-known shorts, one of a number made alongside documentaries that were first shown together as part of a retrospective at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1998.

In its story of a young couple beginning married life together, Avril is a Tati-esque comedy of an old world beset by modernisation and consumerism. Leaving the old working-class neighbourhood where they have spent their lives, the couple move into a new apartment. Their landlord persuades them to stock up on all the most desirable consumer durables they can, until they can barely walk around their flat. Aware that acquisitiveness is souring their marriage, the couple rid themselves of their glut of possessions and attempt to rediscover some simplicity in their conjugal life.

According to French film journal Positif, Avril is "...a poetic missive against the acquisition of objects and the temptations of the materialist life... [It] is striking in that it contains the aesthetic approach and philosophy of the works to come."

In this 45-minute short, Ioselliani is already using dialogue as part of an expressive ambient soundtrack [Ioselliani post-synchronises the sound in all his films] and exploring themes of lost values and a Georgian civilisation superseded by modernity. In an interview with Cahiers Du Cinema about his 1992 film Le Chasse Aux Papillons, Ioselliani told the magazine that "...all my films generally look towards the past, even though I make them while a part of this past still remains". It's interesting to consider how this film, made in the heart of the Soviet film industry, uses the alibi of its anti-materialist message to make comments about the Georgian culture that will inform many of Ioselliani's later films.

His focus on the decay of traditions has not been restricted to his own homeland. In 1989, he went to shoot Et La Lumiere Fut (And Then There Was Light), about a timber company cutting down the trees in a Senegalese village. "I believe," Ioselliani has stated "that to recreate reality means that you safeguard the memory of something that was once very important to you."

Chris Darke