Directors George Varsimashvili and Jeanne Nouchi have made a wistful documentary observing the residents of the dishevelled, elegantly crumbling former sanatorium of the title, located in Georgia. Once a splendid Soviet-era resort hotel with a typically socialist name celebrating industry and labour, the Metalurg has for the last 30 years housed refugees from Abkhazia, the site of a proxy war fought between Georgia and Russian-backed forces. Like Nagorno-Karabakh to the east in Azerbaijan, which has recently been in the news, the Abkhazian conflict has its roots in the Soviet Union’s collapse, and has been fanned by Putin’s neo-imperialist ambitions. But you don’t need to know any of that to find this film quietly moving as it explores the never-ending sense of displacement, nostalgia and melancholy that the residents of the Metalurg experience.
Gradually it emerges that most of the menfolk cleared off some time ago and the majority of the residents are single mothers, widows and children. One woman shares a single bed with her 10-year-old football-mad son, and has a job in a municipal garden that doesn’t pay well but allows her to spend time with him. He, in turn, clearly loves his mum but longs for the company of other children and spends the lonely hours of his summer days chasing a half-flat football down the grand staircase of the hotel. Another elderly resident, confused by dementia, has been offered somewhere else to live in the nearby town but keeps coming back to the Metalurg thinking her next stop will be her hometown back in Abkhazia.
