Tiger competitor Levan Koguashvili's poignant drugs drama Street Days depicts the plight of a 'lost generation' of his fellow Georgians. By Edward Lawrenson
There is a strong and vivid sense of place to Street Days, Georgian director Levan Koguashvili's touching drama set among middle-aged heroin addicts in modern-day Tbilisi. “I feel I'm best making films about things I know well,” says Kougashvili, explaining why he was drawn to the drifters and junkies whose lives he depicts with such affecting compassion.
These Georgian men, he says, “belong to a lost generation. Like me, they grew up under the Soviet system and got used to a very ideal life. Materially it was OK, but the prosperity wasn't built on labour or true values, so lots of young people were spoilt by this ideal life. So when the tough times came, in the 1990s, many of them got lost; since they had to use their energy somewhere, they turned to drugs or alcohol. For me it's painful, I've seen too many people like this. It's a very personal story, the story of my generation.”
Ironically, it was in New York, at film school, that Koguashvili decided to focus on Georgian subject matter. “I made a four-minute film there,” he says, “and the subject was a robbery in the street but I didn't understand why I was doing it: it was a human story but I didn't have enough connection to the characters. But the next project I did was about Georgian immigrants to New York and I had an instant emotional connection: even when I was looking through the viewfinder, I knew how to frame it emotionally. I knew the backgrounds of the people just by their faces. In order to make a strong movie, you have to feel the texture of your characters' lives and environments very well.”
Koguashvili spoke to and befriended many of Tbilisi's addicts while preparing Street Days; a research process that reveals his background in documentary. There's a strong documentary impulse behind his decision to cast some of these real-life addicts in the film. “Many of them had problems remembering lines because they were thinking too much about drugs so I told them, forget about the lines, improvise. They got used to this style of working. It's an additional headache in editing, but it works.”
“The process was very nice,” he says of working with non-professionals. “They enjoyed working. The most important quality of direction – which is something I learned from documentaries – is you have to love the character you're making the film about. And once you love them, they feel it,and they respond.”
So what did they think of the film? “The general response was very good. Dealing with this subject matter, we have to be very careful. Some films about drugs glorify them, even if they don't mean to. Even if you make a masterpiece, if one person gets an idea to experiment with drugs it's not worth it – it's such a foolish waste of time. So the biggest compliment was that these people, who had experience of drugs, felt that my film was against drugs.”
More about Street Days here.