Susa is a twelve-year-old boy. Like any other boy, he likes to collect stickers with images of cars and pieces of colorful stained glass. He lives with his mother on the outskirts of Tbilisi. His daily life consists of a work for an illegal vodka distillery. His mother helps concoct the brew and label the bottles, while his job is to deliver the final product to the town. He goes into cheap cafes and small stalls, finding a prostitute here and a drunk there. Every day, he’s obliged to pay a share of his meager income to a street gang, and avoid the watchful eyes of policemen. One day, Susa’s mother tells him that his father will arrive in few days after a long absence. She assures him that the father’s return means they will soon be back to the normal life they once had—a life that he can barely remember. Allowing a glimmer of hope into his hardscrabble existence, Susa spends the next days preparing for his father’s arrival: he works hard to sell more vodka bottles. Believing that it’s his last day of work, he refuses to pay the street gang and escapes from them. But in the world where Susa lives, hope and expectation turn out to be illusions soon destroyed by reality. Shooting in a neorealist style, debuting feature director Rusudan Pirveli avoids pathos for a more genuine and wrenching catharsis.

Alissa Simon

This is one of the best surreal film ever made right along Alejandro Jodorowsky's "Fando and Lis", Frank Zappa's "200 Motels", and Wojciech Has's "The Saragossa Manuscript." The film is based on Terayama's original play and series of his haiku about his childhood (IMDb's biography on Terayama is excellent and will give you in-depth view of Terayama's art.) The film has timeless Freudian theme about the adolescent trauma, loss of innocence, and deconstruction of self and memories.