Supporting Role

Ana Urushadze’s wry and reflective examination of wounded pride and possibility, led by a magnetic Dato Bakhtadze, navigates comedy and melancholy with guile.

Niaz Ninua has seen brighter days. Once a leading man, he stepped away from cinema some 15 years ago. When he decides to return, he discovers a landscape that no longer revolves around him. He attends a casting session for a supporting role in a debut feature directed by a young woman. The encounter bruises his pride, and he leaves unconvinced, dismissing the role as pretentious and insisting that the elderly and distinctly unflattering character bears no relation to him. Yet as he replays the encounter, Niaz begins to sense a pull to the role he so quickly dismissed. What had seemed beneath him starts to reveal contours he did not anticipate. 

The real key to Ana Urushadze’s sophomore feature lies in a remarkable casting choice. Niaz is played by Dato Bakhtadze, one of Georgian cinema’s few performers to forge a career abroad, appearing, among others, in Sam Hargrave’s Extraction 2 (2023). Bakhtadze brings gravitas and sharp intelligence to every gesture, equally attuned to comedy and drama. Together, Urushadze and Bakhtadze shape a film of striking richness, moving between the surreal and the everyday, the humorous and the affecting. It is a work with its own sense of time, composed with a grace and layered detail that invites viewers to return to its world.

– Vanja Kaludjercic