В Грузии разгорелся спор между режиссером и государственным кинотеатром из-за фильма «Слезоточивый газ», получившего приз в Локкарно

There is something almost too perfectly cinematic about the dispute surrounding Uta Beria’s Tear Gas. A film about a sixteen-year-old girl drawn into a street protest has itself become caught in a confrontation between an artist and the institution that helped finance his work. The film traveled to Locarno, premiered internationally, and won the First Prize of the Junior Jury in the Cineasti del Presente competition. At home, however, its public circulation has become the subject of an institutional dispute. The Georgian National Film Center says that the production company, 1991 Productions, received 279,625 GEL from the state budget, but failed to submit the completed version of the film to the Center. According to the Center, this made it impossible to grant approval for a public screening under the applicable procedures. It says the company was informed of this on July 24, and that Locarno was subsequently notified of the situation. Beria gives a fundamentally different account. He says the Center failed to provide half of the funding awarded to the project in 2022, that the filmmakers nevertheless completed the film by reducing the budget and using personal resources and going into debt, and that the Center warned the filmmakers of a possible financial penalty if the film were publicly screened. He also says the festival itself received a warning shortly before the premiere. The public record currently establishes an institutional dispute over funding, delivery of the final film, and authorization for public exhibition; it does not independently establish every allegation made by either side. But the larger question is harder to avoid: what exactly does a state institution acquire when it funds a work of art? Does public money give the institution a legitimate interest in how and when the resulting film enters the public sphere? Certainly. A public funder has to protect public money, enforce contracts, and verify that funded projects have fulfilled their obligations. But does funding also create a right to determine whether a completed artistic work may be seen? That is a different question. And it becomes particularly uncomfortable when the film concerns the same society from which the funding institution derives its legitimacy. The irony of Tear Gas is that its story was already about a young person encountering the state as a physical presence. The film follows sixteen-year-old Elene and her war-scarred family as they become involved in a mass protest in Tbilisi. The film was shot in the environment of real demonstrations and developed as a Georgian-French-German co-production. At Locarno, it received a prize from a jury composed of young people. The prize was not the festival’s top award (an important distinction) but it was nevertheless a meaningful recognition from an explicitly youth-oriented jury. This creates an almost uncomfortable generational triangle. There is the sixteen-year-old girl inside the film. There is twenty-one-year-old Mate Devidze, to whom Beria dedicated his Locarno prize after describing him as Georgia’s youngest political prisoner. Devidze was arrested during the 2024 Tbilisi protests and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, according to Beria and Georgian media reports. And then there is the institutional world of adults: contracts, budgets, letters, approvals, deadlines and legal procedures. The contrast illustrates a recurring feature of political culture: young people often experience institutions existentially, while institutions experience young people administratively. For a teenager standing in a demonstration, the state can mean police, fear, family, bodily vulnerability and the sudden disappearance of ordinary life. For an institution, the same event may become a question of documentation, authorization and procedural compliance. Neither perspective is inherently illegitimate. But they are radically different ways of understanding reality. And cinema has always been one of the places where those two realities collide. Every country with a serious film culture has had to solve some version of this problem. Public money inevitably enters cinema because the market alone does not reliably finance culturally important, politically difficult or formally adventurous films. Britain’s BFI explicitly describes public funding as a way of supporting creative risk and filmmakers whose projects the commercial sector cannot fully finance. Germany’s Federal Film Board similarly supports films not only at the production stage, but through development, distribution, sales, cinema support and preservation. In other words, public film policy is conceived as an ecosystem: money should help a film come into existence and subsequently reach society. That distinction is crucial. A film is not a building. A state can commission a public building and retain substantial control over its design, safety and operation. A film, by contrast, is a cultural object whose very purpose is circulation: it is made to be seen, discussed, interpreted, rejected, loved, misunderstood and remembered. The public value of cinema therefore does not end when production is completed. In many ways, that is when it begins. This raises a question that extends well beyond Georgia: if taxpayers finance the creation of a film, whose interests should ultimately determine whether the public gets to see it? The institution’s? The producer’s? The filmmaker’s? Or the public’s? The most troubling aspect of the Tear Gas dispute is therefore not necessarily whether one particular document was submitted on time. That can be resolved. The deeper issue is what happens when an institution that exists to develop national cinema becomes the gatekeeper of the national cinema it has helped create. This is an old problem in cultural policy. A state wants artists to produce internationally competitive work. It wants festivals to select national films. It wants public money to generate visible cultural results. But the moment the artist produces something politically uncomfortable, the relationship can change. The artist is no longer simply a beneficiary of public support. He becomes a person whose work the institution must manage. That is where the language of administration becomes politically interesting. “Compliance.” “Procedure.” “Approval.” “Documentation.” “Legal basis.” None of these words are inherently sinister. Functioning cultural institutions require all of them. But bureaucracy has a peculiar ability to become politically charged when applied to art. A legal procedure can be entirely legitimate and still produce a culturally illiberal effect. Conversely, an artist can sincerely experience institutional resistance as censorship while an institution may genuinely believe it is simply enforcing its contractual obligations. Locarno adds another dimension. The film was selected for Cineasti del Presente, a section dedicated to emerging and contemporary cinematic voices. It was not merely screened as a piece of Georgian cultural diplomacy; it entered an international artistic conversation on its own terms. And then something remarkable happened. A film whose domestic circulation became contested was judged abroad by people who had no institutional stake in Georgia’s internal cultural bureaucracy. The young Locarno jury gave it its section’s first prize. That does not prove that Beria is right about every aspect of his dispute with the Film Center. A festival prize is not a legal verdict. But it does create an important asymmetry. The international cultural system has already said, in effect: this work is ready to enter a public conversation. The domestic institution says: there remains a procedural obstacle to its public exhibition. National cinema exists in two worlds simultaneously. It is a domestic cultural product, supported by national institutions and taxpayers. But it is also an ambassador that can travel without passports, entering festivals, museums, cinemas and intellectual debates far beyond its country of origin. A country that wants its cinema to succeed internationally therefore faces an unavoidable paradox: the more internationally confident its filmmakers become, the less completely the state can control the meaning of what they produce. There is another detail here that should not be overlooked. The film is about a sixteen-year-old. Its Locarno prize came from a youth jury. Its director dedicated the award to a twenty-one-year-old imprisoned after political protests. This is, in a very literal sense, a story about the political imagination of a younger generation. Younger generations tend to have a different relationship with institutions than the generations that built them. They are less impressed by institutional prestige and more likely to ask whether an institution is actually doing what it claims to exist for. The question facing the Georgian National Film Center is therefore larger than whether one filmmaker complied with one procedural requirement. It is also a question of institutional legitimacy. What does a national film center exist to protect? Its budget? Its procedures? Its legal authority? Or the possibility that Georgian filmmakers can make difficult films and show them to Georgian audiences? A mature cultural institution should, of course, protect the first three. But ultimately they exist to serve the fourth. There is an old philosophical idea that public life begins when something enters a shared space. Hannah Arendt described the political sphere as a space in which people become visible to one another; where private experience becomes something that can be seen, discussed and contested in public. Cinema performs a similar function. A film does not finish its political life when the director exports a DCP to a festival. It finishes neither when a ministry approves it nor when a producer delivers the final master. Its real life begins when strangers sit in the dark together and watch. That is why the most important word in this entire dispute may be neither “funding” nor “censorship,” It may be “audience.” The audience is the reason the filmmaker makes the film. It is also the reason public institutions fund cinema in the first place. If the public institution’s role eventually becomes controlling which publicly supported films can reach that public, the relationship between patronage and culture begins to reverse itself. The patron becomes a gatekeeper. The artist becomes a supplicant. And the audience, the supposed beneficiary of public cultural policy, disappears from the equation. The dispute over Tear Gas will presumably be resolved through documents, contracts and legal procedures. That is as it should be. But Georgia should resist treating this as merely a quarrel between one filmmaker and one institution. The country is trying to build a cultural industry capable of competing internationally. Its filmmakers increasingly work through European co-productions, international laboratories and major festivals. Tear Gas itself is a Georgian-French-German production, and its path to Locarno illustrates precisely the kind of international cultural network that national film policy should be helping Georgian cinema enter. The question is therefore not whether the state should have rules. It absolutely should. The question is whether those rules are ultimately designed to make Georgian cinema possible or to make Georgian cinema administratively manageable. Those are very different ambitions. A healthy film institution should be capable of funding a filmmaker whose political conclusions it does not share. It should be capable of enforcing contracts without turning contractual enforcement into a substitute for cultural judgment. And it should be confident enough in the strength of its own society to allow difficult films to meet their audience. Because public culture is not measured by how comfortably it reflects the views of the institutions that finance it. It is measured by how much disagreement those institutions are capable of allowing into the room. Tear Gas began as a film about young people encountering a country in crisis. After Locarno, it has become something else as well: a test of whether the country’s cultural institutions can tolerate the consequences of having helped an artist tell that story. And that is a test worth watching. By Ivan Nechaev