IN LIMBO (18 min., colour, Georgia, Germany, 2023)
“We are lost; there is no other penalty
Than to live here without hope, but with desire.”
– Dante, Inferno, Canto IV
A photographer and a filmmaker create portraits of internally displaced people living in former sanatoriums in Georgia, Caucasus. The walls are crumbling, the sunlight moves through the staircase, the sounds of swallows and dripping water mark the passing of time. For thirty years, these refugees from the Georgian-Abkhaz war have been suspended between past and future. Their former home is under Russian control, they are unable to go back and struggling to move forward. The act of posing for a photograph turns into a miniature re-enactment of their lives: one after the other we see them holding still until the sound of the camera shutter ends their waiting, at least in the framework of the film. Sensuos and lyrical, the film explores the experience of arrested time in the long aftermath of war.