Tangerines

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

The production was a co-production between Estonia and Georgia, made in part to honour the small Estonian-speaking community of the Caucasus that had emigrated to Abkhazia in the late nineteenth century — most of whom had returned to Estonia by the 1990s. The film is shot in Russian and Estonian, with the cast led by Lembit Ulfsak (one of Estonia's most celebrated actors of the late Soviet and post-independence era) alongside Elmo Nüganen, Misha Meskhi and Giorgi Nakashidze. Cinematography is by Rein Kotov.

The 1992–1993 War in Abkhazia, in which Georgian forces and Abkhaz separatists fought over the breakaway region with Russian military involvement, was an unusual subject for cinema; this film remains one of the very few feature treatments of the conflict in any language. Urushadze died in late 2019 at the age of fifty-three, having directed only a small number of features; Tangerines is the work he is now principally remembered for, both in Georgia and internationally.