Blu-ray: Beginning : vimarsana.com

This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways.
This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways. It stands out not only for its hypnotic quality as a film that feels like that of an already formed auteur, as well as for the complex psychological portrait of its central female character, but also, rather more paradoxically, for the environment from which it has emerged. Always distinctive, the cinema of the small Caucasian nation of Georgia has usually been distinguished by its vivid local colour, but there’s nothing like that here: though it’s set in the director’s homeland – indeed in the very landscape in which she herself grew up – it’s as if Kulumbegashvili has stripped back atmosphere and story alike to wind up a tight drama that could be taking place anywhere in the world where oppression, both private and public, can be found. Two decades ago the emerging Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev achieved something comparable in his own debut