Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

A charming character study about love, liberty and the pursuit of forbidden fruit, set in the Georgian countryside.

Shopkeeper Etero is approaching middle age with her autonomy and her virginity intact. After a near-death experience while picking blackberries in the hills outside her rural village, she begins a passionate love affair with a local man and is faced with a familiar conundrum: whether to maintain her hard-won freedom or succumb to the possibility of imperfect coupledom. “If marriage and dicks brought happiness,” Etero snaps at a would-be suitor, “many women would be happy.”

Premiering at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Georgian filmmaker Elene Naveriani’s third feature is a complex portrait of late-life desire that, like Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria, depicts its ageing protagonist’s sensuality without sentimentality or cliché. Eka Chavleishvili is utterly magnetic as Etero, a misfit whose preference for self-sufficiency is hard-won, and whose contentment isn’t contingent on romance. Instead, her sexual awakening holds up a mirror to social conformity, reflecting a close-knit community threatened by her rebellious spirit.