Tangerines (2013)

Tangerines arrives from 2013, an Estonian and Georgian co-production directed by Zaza Urushadze, and it concerns itself with the War in Abkhazia. An elderly Estonian carpenter named Ivo has stayed behind to build crates for a tangerine harvest while the region tears itself apart around him. Two wounded soldiers, one Chechen mercenary and one Georgian volunteer, are brought under his roof, and he extracts from each a promise of no bloodshed inside his home. The arrangement holds, barely, and the two men slowly trade hostility for something like respect. It is a small, patient film about a large, impatient war.

Measured against the contemporary cultural toolkit, the film is nearly bare. The cast is regionally authentic without any representation agenda attached to it. There are no LGBTQ characters or themes, no feminist framing, and almost no women at all. The central conflict is ethnic and national, which is not the same register as modern racial consciousness. The tangerines are a livelihood, not an environmental allegory. A mercenary's cash is refused on moral grounds, not economic ones. Wounded bodies are simply wounded bodies. A head injury is a head injury. History is neither revised nor reclaimed. What the film offers instead is a familiar humanist plea, and it is content to let that plea do its work through character.

Where the film does lean forward is in its pacifism. The message of reconciliation is explicit and unmissable, though it is dramatized through argument and loss instead of delivered as a sermon. Ivo's quiet insistence that the dead be buried together carries the weight of the whole enterprise. The result is earnest, well acted, and entirely of an older tradition. It asks us to grieve, not to reeducate ourselves, and in that restraint it earns more than it demands.

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