Tangerines

Zaza Urushadze's Tangerines (Estonian: Mandariinid; Georgian: Mandarinebi) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2015 ceremony, the first Estonian film ever to be nominated, and for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film the same year. It won the Audience Award at the Warsaw International Film Festival in 2013 and was a fixture of the international festival circuit through 2014.

Estonia and Georgia co-produced it, partly to honour the small Estonian-speaking community of the Caucasus that had emigrated to Abkhazia in the late nineteenth century, most of whom had gone back to Estonia by the 1990s. The dialogue is in Russian and Estonian. Lembit Ulfsak, one of Estonia's most celebrated actors of the late Soviet and post-independence era, leads a cast that includes Elmo Nüganen, Misha Meskhi and Giorgi Nakashidze, and the cinematographer is Rein Kotov.

The War in Abkhazia of 1992-1993, in which Georgian forces and Abkhaz separatists fought over the breakaway region with Russian military involvement, has rarely reached the screen, and this is still one of very few feature films about the conflict in any language. That alone would make it worth seeing; the performances and the restraint make it more than a curiosity. Urushadze died in late 2019 at the age of fifty-three, having directed only a small number of features, and Tangerines is the one he is remembered for, in Georgia and internationally.