Georgian film-maker Elene Mikaberidze’s first feature-length work is a gentle, sweet-natured and deeply embedded documentary that observes a working-class family over a year and a half as they start a blueberry plantation. The opening text informs us that Soso, father of the family, was originally an engineer but has chosen to pack in his profession and take up farming partly because the Georgian government is offering attractive credit incentives, particularly for those who work the land near the border with Abkhazia, once part of Georgia but effectively a puppet state of Russia since the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.
The film starts tracking the family from April 2021, so war is very much on the minds of everyone here, even Soso’s irrepressible 10-year-old son, Lazare, who proudly shows off his pictures of soldiers and explosions in a school art show. Elsewhere, Lazare, his older brother, Giorgi, and another kid chat about the region’s politics and history after a Christmas-meal, speculating on how great it would have been if the Germans had killed Putin’s mother during the second world war.
For the most part, though, the film is concerned with the here and now of blueberry farming, as Soso and the boys tend to their rows of bushes; the kids show less enthusiasm for the agriculture than their dad, although they chip in uncomplainingly enough when the first harvest comes. But Soso learns the hard way that it is a struggle to make a profit, especially as buyers serving the European market are few, and they must sell to the despised Russians to make a profit, much to the disgust of Soso’s long-suffering wife, Nino.
Given the subject matter, this – unsurprisingly – is a work of stately, meditative pacing but never so slow-moving as to feel soporific. For starters, there is always a dog or two causing mischief somewhere in the frame, or some other bit of business to please the eye. And while it doesn’t balk at showing that the family has chosen a challenging way of life, there is no great tragedy waiting in the third act as is so often the way with films like this. Plus, the family come across as nice, regular folk, affectionate with one another but still able to laugh at each other kindly, and take a moment to dance in the kitchen to a favourite old song.
Blueberry Dreams is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 13 March.