The debut feature from renowned alternative musician Kote Kalandadze, The Drummer is a gritty, heartfelt portrait of creativity and desperation in the margins of modern Georgian society. Niko (Lasha Tskvitinidze) is an aspiring rock drummer in a crumbling Tbilisi suburb, eking out a living through his factory job – until a fateful meeting with charismatic drug dealer Kogo (Gogi Dzodzuashvili) threatens to derail his precarious dream of a fulfilled artistic life.

The long shadow of war hangs over a village in Nagorno-Karabakh in this meditative documentary from Armenian-Belgian filmmaker Comes Chahbazian.

Daniel Kötter’s documentary road movie journeys through the stunning but troubled mountain landscape of eastern Armenia in an attempt to unravel the relationship between war, displacement, and extractivism. Centred around the Sotk gold mine, occupied by Azerbaijani forces during the 2020 Karabakh War, Kötter’s film is alive to both the human and the non-human actors at work in this disputed territory, where war and resource extraction have become two sides of the same coin, deadly processes waged over the population by distant forces. Influenced by the psycho-geographical style of Patrick Keiller, this is a thought-provoking and unsettling vision of life in the borderlands.

To celebrate the centenary of Armenian film, we present a new restoration of this neglected silent classic by Hamo Bek-Nazaryan, the founding father of the nation’s cinema. This historical melodrama recounts the brutal suppression of an oil workers’ strike in prerevolutionary Baku. Bek-Nazaryan’s mastery of the silent screen is on full display here, from the striking use of close-ups and densely-plotted narrative intrigue to the showstopping devastation of the finale. Presented with a new score by up-and-coming British composer Juliet Merchant.