Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird

Otar Iosseliani’s second feature, the last of his films with a single protagonist, is a breezy character study keyed to the gliding rhythms of the Georgian capital. Gia (Gela Kandelaki), an inveterate flâneur employed by the Tbilisi Philharmonic, spends his days impulsively flirting and carousing around town, always arriving just in the nick of time to perform his cue on the timpani drum. Suffused with a vibrant soundscape of the streets and music of Iosseliani’s home city, and directed with a touch both refined and off-the-cuff, Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird is a rich feast for the eyes and ears. A selection of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 1974, the film is a leap towards the freewheeling, purely observational style that would become Iosseliani’s celebrated hallmark. (Otar Iosseliani, Georgia, 1970, 85 min.) In Georgian and Russian with English subtitles