DOUBLE ALIENS [documentary]
IDFA 2015 Competition for Mid-Length Documentary / Best Documentary at the Batumi International Arthouse Film Festival 2015 / Best Film at the CINEDOC Festival, Tbilisi 2015 / Riga IFF 2015 opening film
Road maps are open, endless texts that may contain any number of stories, including the story of the traveler himself. A filmmaker from the north and a photographer from the south travel to a strange place. It is a land where people are worn out by their history, where time tends to freeze and every encounter is a distortion mirror that makes you look into familiar eyes. A road movie about Samtskhe-Javakheti, an isolated region in the republic of Georgia, where Georgians and Armenians live together in suppressed hostility.
DOUBLE ALIENS [trailer]
"I have come to believe that some places of the Earth are connected by some invisible neural network, yet unknown to science. When I first crossed into the vast Javakheti plateau in southern Georgia, I felt as if I knew this place and had heard its stories already. There, as in my own country, people tend to draw lines between themselves and their neighbours. In Latvia, the line runs between the ethnic Latvian population and the Russian-speaking minority. In Javakheti, it cuts through the Armenian majority and the Georgian minority. Their memories are soaked with too much pain and suffering and history.
After five trips to that land I lost count of all those complicated relationships – of who invaded whom, who killed whom, who lost, obeyed, objected, was rejected... What remained was the feeling that there, around the volcanic cones of the South Caucasus mountains, the air breathes upon us thicker, heavier and slower. This film is an attempt to get to the ‘why’ of this feeling."
Ugis Olte, director
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Director: Ugis Olte
Cinematographers: Valdis Celmins, Daro Sulakauri, Uldis Cekulis
Sound designer & mixer: Artis Dukalskis
Music: Instrumenti
Editor: Uģis Olte
Producers: Uldis Cekulis, Anna Dziapshipa
Production company: VFS Films, SakDoc
2014
© 2025 Uģis Olte
All rights reserved.