Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Georgia but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Georgia
Movie: Gondola
Director: Veit Helmer
Year: 2023
The Elevator Pitch: Iva returns to her Georgian village after the death of her mother and gets a job operating a gondola that goes over the valley. Nino is a gondola operator who dreams of becoming a flight attendant to move away from the small village and the boss who harasses her to gain her affection. Several times a day, Nino and Iva’s gondolas pass each other, each one building their interest in each other.
How Was the Movie?: If a movie could cause me to puke rainbows, it would be this one. We were hoping to watch Holy Electricity but couldn’t because it’s still doing the cinema circuit so we had to “settle” for this movie instead. While it’s not ideal because the director is German and the spoken language is Georgian only in that there is no spoken dialogue (!) it was absolutely worth watching and I would really recommend it if you have any amount of whimsy in your body.
While it could have used a little bit of dialogue at times for the most part you won’t even notice it. The film is a little twee, a little Wes Anderson but only in the fact that it has a very set up look to many of the scenes, the director is not trying to be Wes Anderson. I don’t want to spoil the movie because it’s biggest impacts come from the extremely small sight gags and the slowly escalating nonsense the two gondola operators get up to but this movie is so extremely careful with its set up of colors, shots, and musical cues that it’s all pulled off seamlessly. I love it because of the dual theme of love needing no words in order to bloom but also that the lack of dialogue makes it more fairytale-like to me as well.
There are so many fun little camera tricks and gags in this that I can easily recommend it to almost anyone, I think it’s just really delightfully fun.
What was for Dinner?:
It’s good to give yourself a little break every now and then and we have a couple of good Georgian restaurants in town so I decided to make use of them to order of course, Adzaruli Khachapuri along with Satsivi and Medok. If you’re not familiar with Georgian food, khachapuri is a bread filled with farm style cheese (usually a fresh, loose, very salty cheese). There’s all different styles but my favorite is Adzaruli because what isn’t made better with a runny egg on top? Riddle me that. I know traditionally it’s eaten by tearing pieces of the side and dunking them but that didn’t work well for eating while watching a movie so we did a weird thing instead.
For the main course we ordered satsivi which is chicken in a walnut sauce and of course some delicious oven roasted potatoes. It’s not as overpowering as you’d think because it’s heavily spiced with herbs, garlic, and pepper.
And for dessert is medok, a type of layered biscuit honey cake, which is a staple of a lot of places (in Estonia it’s known as meekook). It’s sweet and almost caramel like with a very moist consistency thanks to many layers of cream in-between. I would have gotten churchkhela (which is nuts covered in grape must, a by-product of wine making) but I would have had to go across town and they would also only sell a full kilo of it so I decided to take it extra easy with a “boring” dessert.
We also tried two Georgian wines, both were absolutely fantastic!
Obviously I have less notes about the whole thing because I’ve eaten all these things before and I ordered take out but it was an easy meal for an easy movie and we extra food and wine the next day!
That’s it for Georgia, see you next in Bolivia!