Nandauri

Marina (Neta Riskin), an Israeli lawyer, arrives in a remote Georgian mountain village on an ambiguous mission. She is there on behalf of a client, Nino, who left Georgia years earlier and now wants her 11-year-old son Bacha back. The boy has been raised by Nino’s brother Dato (Roland Okropiridze), who greets Marina with open hostility. To obtain Bacha’s birth certificate, the two must travel together to Tbilisi, journeying through a mountainous, rural Georgia that is sublime and suffocating in equal measure. As the film unfolds, Marina must reckon with her Georgian roots and with an attraction to Dato that cuts against everything she came to do.

A five-time Ophir Award-winner, including Best Director and Best Actress, Nandauri is a striking debut from Eti Tsicko, who draws on her own Georgian background to tell a story that resists easy conclusions about the world Marina left behind or the people who still live in it. Riskin, who learned Georgian for the role, commands every scene, while Shai Goldman’s cinematography renders the immense mountain landscapes with the same ambivalence the film brings to the culture they contain: beautiful and severe and not easily forgotten. —Johanna Gustin

Bay Area Premiere

Eti Tsicko is an Israeli film director and screenwriter, born in 1982 to immigrant parents from Georgia. A graduate of the Steve Tisch School of Film & Television at Tel Aviv University, she has directed short films including Daswarilli (Stained), Audition, Dog-Leash (Cannes Film Festival), and Ruso, which have screened at festivals in Israel and internationally. Her debut feature Nandauri (2025) premiered at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, where it won Best Debut Film and Best Cinematography, and later received five Ophir Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography. She is currently developing her second feature Mother Tongue and the television series Curse, and teaches directing, screenwriting, and acting at the Steve Tisch School of Film & Television at Tel Aviv University.