Since Otar Left

A small miracle of empathy, writer/director Julie Bertuccelli’s first feature follows a family of three Georgian women as they work through their generational conflicts in the ramshackle capital of Tbilisi, while their son/brother/uncle Otar is away in Paris. He’s been to medical school but is working construction illegally till he can get a visa. All the performances are amazing, from the hunched-over but indomitable grandmother with a nostalgia for strongman Stalin, to the sensuous but stifled widow of the Afghan war, to the exquisitely plain beauty of the student daughter trying to negotiate between the older women while finding a way of her own. A window through the rusted-away Iron Curtain, with a poignant dream of the City of Light, this film feels right in each detail and every beat of its open heart. There’s an ineradicable beauty amidst the rubble, an emotional richness amidst the deprivation, a familial mix of smiles and tears right through to the quietly devastating but exalting conclusion. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-86, RT-98.)