The fighting in Georgia can be hard to follow from afar, but it traces a theme that has been recurring ever since the Soviet Union shattered into 15 countries in 1991. Georgia was one of those lands that gained independence, but it soon degenerated into a war in the northern region of Abkhazia, where Russian-backed separatists carved out a piece of territory they claim and hold until this day.
The conflict feels eerily familiar now in the context of the current turmoil in Ukraine, and has haunted much of recent Georgian cinema (or, to be fair, the limited scope of Georgian cinema that reaches North American audiences). In 2012’s The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear and 2013’s In Bloom, the war is never directly seen but its ravaging effect on Georgian society—the thousands of dead, the broken families that resulted—is evident. Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines, meanwhile, is actually set during the war, but the movie examines the conflict so circumspectly that it actually feels more distant than in either of the other films.
Urushadze’s movie, a surprise Oscar nominee earlier this year for Best Foreign Language Film, centers on Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak), an Estonian living in what is now a Georgian war zone. While the majority of his fellow Estonians have returned home to escape the conflict—according to an opening title card, Estonian communities in Georgia date back 100 years—Ivo has stayed to help his neighbor, Margus (Elmo Nüganen), harvest his tangerine crop, for which Ivo makes the crates.
Ivo and Margus seem relatively protected from the front lines of the war, but the conflict comes to them when two Abkhazian mercenaries arrive looking for food and proceed to get in a gunfight with Georgian soldiers outside Margus’s home. Two wounded men emerge—the first, Ahmed (Giorgi Nakashidze), an Abkhazian; the second, Niko (Misha Meskhi), a Georgian—and Ivo brings them both back to his house to help them recover.