FilmFestivals.com - Cannes 2000

Georgian director Dito Tsintsadze burst on to the international scene in 1993 when his On The Edge was awarded a Silver Leopard at the Locarno festival. This laconic tale, set in Tbilisi on the verge of the Georgian civil war, records in minute detail the psychological pressure that mounts on a young man, an idle observer in a nearly abandoned city, to maintain his independence despite the contradictions of his stance. For by remaining neutral, he will eventually lose contact with friends and surroundings, thus isolating himself and leaving himself vulnerable. Unfortunately, On The Edge had placed Tsintsadze in the front ranks of Georgian film-makers at a time when production at the Gruzia Studios had ground to a standstill. For the next seven years, he was without work.

Born in 1957 in Tbilisi, Tsintsadze studied at the Georgian Institute For Film & Theatre (1975-81), made a handful of short films and worked as an assistant for other directors. His first two medium-length feature films, however, marked him out as a director with a feel for atmosphere and the foibles of human behaviour. Guests (1991) is an absurd chronicle of a family receiving unexpected visitors, in which no one is sure who the guests are in the first place. In Home (1991), the focus is on a young woman who lives in a milieu of apathy, plainness and indifference. Both of these films served as études for the written-and-directed auteur study of the vacillating young man in On The Edge.

In Lost Killers, a tragi-comedy shot in Mannheim with financial backing by enterprising Berlin producer Peter Rommel, Tsintsadze has his cameraman (Benedict Neuenfels) follow a pair of hapless,
fumbling hitmen around the city as they stalk their prey. Branko (Misel Maticevic) and Merab (Lasha Bakradze) don't know why they are to rub out their unsuspecting businessman target, nor even how to find him in the first place. Each time a ripe opportunity presents itself, something absurd and coincidental stymies the pair. So these lost killers enlist Carlos (Elie James Blezes), a mammoth illegal Haitian fugitive, and his friend Lan (Nicole Seelig), a pint-sized Vietnamese prostitute, to help get the job done and end up

with an unexpected and unexplained murder on their hands. Watch out for Tsintsadze himself in a cameo role.

Ron Holloway