The Sokhumi Elegies examines the memory and legacy of the War in Abkhazia, the brutal conflict which occurred between 1992 and 1993 in what was then the north-west corner of the Republic of Georgia.
Focusing on the tactile and felt experience of the war and the sense of memory and connection to a certain time and place, cinematic footage of modern Abkhazia is complemented with archival footage of Sokhumi before the war, montages of archival photographs, occasional elements of Abkhaz and Georgian folk music, and a series of love songs recorded in Abkhazia between the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Tying together the political and the personal into a story about the human dimensions of political failure, the work intends to be an uncertain elegy for the sorrow of war, the misery of exile, and the haunting presence of memory and trauma.