Tangerines (Zaza Urushadze, 2013): Estonia

Reviewed by e Howard Green.  Attended at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, February 6, 2015 at the Metro 4 Theatre.

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival again showed its selection prowess by hosting the 1992 Georgian war story Tangerines.  It is one of all five 2015 Academy Award nominations in the Foreign Language category being offered in SBIFF’s 3oth Anniversary season.  (See elsewhere on this site reviews of other candidates.)

Two Estonian men refuse to flee the region of Abkhazian during a mass exodus at the beginning of the Soviet conflict over Georgia, staying to bring a crop of tangerines to market.  The box maker Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) and farmer Margus (Elmo Nuganen) are caught up in crossfire of two rival combat teams and Ivo takes in a badly wounded soldier from each side.  As they recover, they are initially hostile to the other but develop mutual respect.

Directed, produced, and written by Zaza Urushadze (Georgian film director and screenwriter).  Tangerines was filmed in Georgia using locally prominent actors, performing in Estonian and Russian languages.  The budget was (only) some 650,000 euros.

Much of the film is set in the simple house of Ivo or his factory, and details are abundant of the “make do” way of life of countryside living.  Tangerines contains many shots of rural landscape and orchards, but is interspersed with small scale combat action and death, realistically depicted.  It might be classified in the pacifist gendre.