Cinephiles must see the exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama Corn Island. If it doesn’t turn out to be the best contemporary art movie at Cinequest 2015, I’ll be shocked. Corn Island has won nineteen film festival awards and was shortlisted for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.
Director George Ovashvili has created a near-masterpiece of filmmaking with this unhurried yet compelling story. We learn that each spring, Georgia’s Irguri River creates temporary islands of topsoil that local farmers squat on to grow enough corn to get them through the next winter (when the island will be washed away). We see an old man choose one particular island of maybe an acre. He brings his 12- or 13-year-old orphan granddaughter to help him, and they build a shack and plant and cultivate a tiny field of corn. The audience isn’t really watching corn grow, but we are observing how the man and the granddaughter react to what happens.
The storytelling is remarkably spare. There’s not even any dialogue during the first 25 minutes – and there are probably only about 30 spoken lines in the entire movie.
The old man is played by veteran Turkish actor Ilyas Salman is a superb performance. Georgian newcomer Mariam Buturishvili plays the granddaughter. Her eyes are very expressive, so she doesn’t need to say much. We watch her show up at the island clutching her doll – and then outgrowing it.
Here’s what you need to know before seeing Corn Island: the Irguri River separates Georgia from the separatist region of Abkhazia. The main characters speak Abkhaz. The soldiers patrolling the river are variously Georgian soldiers, Abkhaz militia and Russian peacekeepers.
So settle in for a contemplative experience and just watch this story unfold through Ovashvili’s masterful lens. Corn Island plays Cinequest again today, March 1 and March 4 at Camera 12.
[MILD SPOILER ALERT: The filmmakers built their own island in a manmade lake so they could control the water. And that is the only way that they could have filmed the spectacular climax.]