Description: Didi mtsvane veli is a 1967 Family/Drama film directed by Merab Kokochashvili, starring Dodo Abashidze, Lia Kapanadze, Mzia Maglakelidze and written by Merab Eliozishvili.

UPDATED! Added DVD-Rip (itsartolie – big-thank you very much!)

Frankly speaking: never, and no film did not make me such a strong impression
(I left the theater and I was shaking – literally). But. First, it was in the early 90-ies.
Secondly, I was a young man with a Soviet mentality. And for this young man's movie was an absolute shock.
Therefore, it is difficult to say what you see in the film. However – I recommend.

Short Sharp Shock This film shows the life and fate of three young foreigners - Turk Gabriel, Greek Costa and Serb Bobby, all of them dreaming of love and money in the bleak surroundings of social welfare, crimes, industry, unemployment and cultural minorities. Of course it won't take long until the friendship of the three outsiders is about to break apart when Gabriel becomes a henchman for a local gangster boss, and a journey through violence and despair begins for all three of them...

Three women -- a grandmother, a middle-aged daughter, and a university-student granddaughter, live together, male-less, in Tblisi amid post-Soviet economic collapse. An occasional hard-currency bill shows up in letters from a beloved son/brother/uncle, who has qualified as a physician but is working as a clandestine laborer in Paris. The women snap at each other, manipulate one another, and confront life as best they can, each from her own perspective and unique experience. There is a large apartment filled with treasured bibelots and French books, and the suggestion of a more respectable, Chekovian Francophile pre-revolutionary past.

This crazy, satirical epic humorously portrays several eras in European history. Though the costumes and regimes change, the film suggests, the human motives of lust and greed remain the same. Jumping back and forth in time, the film condemns its characters to an eternity of irony. In one section, a medieval king named Vano, who has a penchant for exotic torture techniques, executes his wife for being unfaithful. Seamlessly the film flashes forward to the early 1930s, with another Vano, played by the same actor, portraying a low-down thief who suddenly seizes power. Intercut with all of this is the story of a contemporary Vano, a hapless drunk who wanders across the underworlds of Europe. This extraordinary film expresses rage against the dark side of human nature that keeps despots in power, despite the upheavals of history, but it does so with a delightfully comic edge.

Iosseliani’s contemporary fables of modern life and traditional values have been compared to the classic comedies of French master Jacques Tati. Shrewdly whimsical and filmed with a poetic casualness, Iosseliani’s universe is one of joyous pessimism. (-DVD back cover)

Iosseliani’s contemporary fables of modern life and traditional values have been compared to the classic comedies of French master Jacques Tati. Shrewdly whimsical and filmed with a poetic casualness, Iosseliani’s universe is one of joyous pessimism. (-DVD back cover)