what we shared (2021)

Format: HD
Country: UK/Abkhazia
Duration: 69mins
Direction: Kamila Kuc
Script: Kamila Kuc, with contributions from all performers
Music written and performed: Timothy Nelson
Editing: Kamila Kuc, Nina Zabicka
Performers: Sergey Arutiunov, Tamriko Basaria, Manana Bigvava, Aslan Enik, Oleg Koryavov, Vladimir Nikonov, Sonia White
Voice artist: Leena Makoff
Language: English, Russian and Abkhaz, with English subtitles
Producer: Kamila Kuc
Executive Producer: Katie McGowan
Co-Producer: Reed O’Beirne
Associate producer: Asida Butba
For full credits, see the film’s Official Website.

Seven inhabitants of Abkhazia, a de facto state on the Black Sea, unfurl a web of stories about loss and displacement through the re-imaginings of dreams and memories of the 1992-93 war with Georgia. To question the unstable distinction between fact and fiction, these re-imaginings are interwoven with auto-fictional narration and archival materials that have been processed through an AI technology. The Black Sea permeating the film’s world acts as a metaphor of both an idyllic holiday destination of utopian happiness; as well as a perilous force, a place of conspiracy and death. What We Shared employs emotive soundscape and imagery to produce a sensory reflection on artistic practice as a powerful binding force and an act of resistance to dominant power structures.

‘By recreating personal stories though testimony, poetry and archival material, the artist and performers explore deep traumas that no single place or language can contain. Abkhazia, the disputed state on the Black Sea – once an opulent Soviet holiday resort with a multi-ethnic population – became a symbolic ghost town following the 1992-93 war with Georgia. Here, fragmented memories and dreams destroyed by violence and exile are exhumed through interpretive re-enactment and haunting sound.’ Helen de Witt, BFI London Film Festival (2021)

Made in collaboration with SKLAD Cultural Centre, Sukhum/i, Abkhazia and funded by the Arts Council England (UK), Coventry University and NJL Foundation.

Screenings:
65th BFI London Film Festival, World Premiere
45th Göteborg Film Festival, Göteborg, Sweden, International Premiere
60th Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
BGS London Georgian Film Festival
Prismatic Ground, Maysles Documentary Centre, New York City
Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder, Colorado
Whitechapel Gallery, London
The Pushkin House, London
ArtKino, Rijeka, Croatia
SKLAD, Sukhum/i, Abkhazia, Abkhaz Premiere
The New School, School of Media Studies, NYC. Co-sponsored by The Harriman Institute, Columbia University
6th Biennale of the Moving Image, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Visible Evidence: Images of History conference, Faculty of Social Sciences University of Gdansk, Poland
The 5th BEAST International Film Festival, Territories section, OKNE, Porto, Portugal
Ann Arbor Film Festival PRESENTS Monthly Screening Series, The State Theatre, Ann Arbor, MI
Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Goethe-Institut, Tbilisi, Georgia
Cafe Mziuri, Tbilisi, Georgia
Festival Image Ouverte, Paris
King’s College, London
Industry events:
The 18th East Silver Market, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, in collaboration with Institute of Documentary Film, Prague, Czech Republic, October 2021
Visions du Réel Industry, Nyon, Switzerland, April, 2022