Both stories included in this book are Nugzar Shataidze’s well-known works, and were an instant success from first publication; years later they became the basis for two extremely popular films. In 2009 the director Giorgi Ovashvili made a film The Both stories included in this book are Nugzar Shataidze’s well-known works, and were an instant success from first publication; years later they became the basis for two extremely popular films. In 2009 the director Giorgi Ovashvili made a film The Other Bank, based on A Journey to Africa, and achieving tremendous success at film festivals worldwide. The Island, which the author initially saw as a literary screenplay for a future film was made into the film Corn Island only after the author’s death in 2014. The film won the Crystal Globe prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and was selected as the Georgian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards, making the January shortlist.
A Journey to Africa A young refugee Tedo and his mother flee war and ethnic cleansing in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia, leaving his father behind. After arriving in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, the young boy encounters difficulties. He feels utterly alone in an alien city, and goes off to his native village to search for his father. The village isn’t far, but the journey is difficult and dangerous, full of countless painful incidents, as well as rough living conditions. The 12-year-old boy, on his journey to lost dreams, homeland and his father, is forced to put on a thousand masks and tell countless lies, and undergo many ordeals. The journey involves the environment of the 1990s, the panorama of devastation and destruction, idle factories, rusting cars, railway sleepers, tracks, pipes senselessly scattered, deserted streets, huts blocking the pavements, hungry stray dogs, the choking smell of rubbish heaps and people rifling through them, muddy roads, deserted allotments and abandoned gardens, withered fields of grain – all described in a very graphic way. People who are right at the bottom are all around the main hero. Adolescents intoxicate themselves with acetone: they are hungry and cold. But they have an instinct for solidarity and standing together, even though they are all on their own, existing with nowhere to go, tramps, prostitutes, beggars. With 27 lari and a gold ring he has stolen from his mother, the boy goes to Abkhazia, a region more frightening than any other, as remote as Africa. He’s not afraid, because he has been travelling to a place where he knew harmony between his parents. And here is their block of flats – a silent, deserted, derelict building with not a pane of glass left intact. This is the return of the Prodigal Son to emptiness, to a house with no father. The ‘return’ is described so clearly and so realistically that it becomes for us a symbolic picture of the Abkhaz conflict. The sick father has married and gone away somewhere; there is no trace of him, and the last illusion is shattered. For some time his mother has belonged to someone else, and is also somewhere else, in very dubious company. All the boy has left is to return to his camp, to the lower depths from where he made a vain attempt to escape. He sniffs acetone glue so as to drown his grief with this popular, democratic drug.
Corn Island was devised by Shataidze not as a a story, but as a literary film script, and it became the basis for a film. Two men live on the island: a grandfather who has discovered the area and his little grand-daughter, who isn’t too old to play with dolls, but not so small that she can’t make her own choices. These two symbols of the passing and the coming generations happen to have found a home on this land they have chanced to find. They make themselves a refuge, they till the soil and this alone makes them happy, because they are not affected by the rattle of machine-gun fire from the distant river banks. But this idyllic paradise turns out to be short-lived, when the sound of machine-guns ends up close to their island.

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Mary Childs and Lia Shartava 

JOURNEY TO AFRICA

Until now, I thought that only my mother had eyes of different colors. It turns out no, others have them as well. My father has honey-colored eyes, and me, too, but my mother has one blue, the other -- green. I don't remember anyone noticing them, and not being surprised – “Ooh, Keti, what eyes you have!” My mother would always smile at this, as if she were even proud that she wasn't like others, but recently her eyes have taken on a single color; both of them are ash-grey. Maybe because she's started drinking.