Dancing Turtle Films is proud to announce the distribution of Sakartvelo: Dances of Freedom, a documentary short by filmmaker Vladislav Amelin, produced by Ilya Blokh. The film was shot across several nights in Tbilisi in May 2024, during what became the largest anti-government demonstrations in Georgia’s recent history. It contains no interviews, no narration and no explanatory voiceover — just a camera moving through crowds of people marching, singing and dancing in the streets. It is one of the most quietly powerful pieces of documentary filmmaking we have seen in some time.
To understand why those people were in the streets, you need to understand where Georgia has been.
Georgia is a small country in the South Caucasus with a population of fewer than four million people, sandwiched between Russia to the north and Turkey and Armenia to the south. It has been fighting for its identity for most of its modern history — occupied by the Soviet Union from 1921, independent again since 1991, and since then caught in a slow and unresolved struggle between two gravitational pulls: the Europe it aspires to join and the Russia it has spent decades trying to escape.
That struggle came to a head in the spring of 2024. The ruling Georgian Dream party — widely understood to be under the influence of Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Russian-made billionaire who has dominated Georgian politics since 2012 — reintroduced a law requiring any organisation receiving more than 20% of its funding from abroad to register as an “agent of foreign influence.” The framing was transparency. The model, unmistakably, was Russia, where an almost identical law passed in 2012 has since been used to systematically dismantle independent civil society, silence critical journalism and criminalise dissent. Georgia’s own president, Salome Zourabichvili, called it “fundamentally Russian” and an “exact duplicate.” She vetoed it. Parliament overrode her veto. The law passed on 14 May 2024 with 84 votes to 30.
The implications were profound. Georgia had been granted EU candidate status in December 2023 — a moment of genuine popular celebration in a country where pro-European sentiment runs deep and where memories of Russia’s 2008 invasion, which resulted in the occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, remain raw. The Foreign Agents Law put that candidacy in immediate jeopardy. The European Union suspended Georgia’s accession process. The United States imposed travel sanctions on Georgian officials deemed responsible for undermining democracy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the law moved Georgia “away from its Euro-Atlantic future.”
Tens of thousands of Georgians had been in the streets for weeks before the vote, and they stayed there after it. On the night of 13 May — the night before the final parliamentary vote — the protests reached their peak. And yet the crowds kept coming, night after night, to the streets around the parliament building in central Tbilisi — marching, singing, dancing.
It is that last detail that gives the film its title and its particular power. People do not dance in the streets when things are going well. They dance when they need to remind themselves and each other of what they are fighting for. Amelin’s camera follows them through the tear gas and the water cannon with a quiet, sustained attention that trusts its audience to understand what they are seeing without being told.
The title carries a double meaning. Sakartvelo is the Georgian name for Georgia — the land of the Kartvelian people. At a moment when that people are being asked to choose between their European future and a drift back towards Moscow’s orbit, the question of what it means to be Georgian is not abstract. The film answers it without words: people in the streets, at night, in the face of riot police, refusing to go home.
The protests have continued since the law was passed. The dance continues. So does the struggle for Georgia’s future.
Sakartvelo: Dances of Freedom is available now.
