The Svan people live on the northern mountains of Georgia, still following ancient traditions. Village Ushguli is surrounded by towers and walls to keep feudal tax collectors at distance. The people travel to mountains, chisel layers from them, drag them on a travois without wheels, and use them as riles for rooftops. They collect grains, threshing them via another travois carried by a cow going in circles. There is a lack of salt in the area, so men often travel to bring some. An elderly man dies, and since it is considered bad luck to give birth during a funeral, a pregnant woman is banished from the village: she gives birth alone, but the baby dies, so she drips her milk on the soil of its grave. In order to rid the village from this isolation and backwardness, the new Soviet government organizes workers to build roads and connect the village with civilization.
Voted in a local national poll as one of the 12 best films of Georgian cinema, "Salt for Svanetia" is an hour-long ethnographic silent film that was presented as a documentary, but is in reality a docudrama where anonymous actors stage and recreate the events of an isolated, backward village, Ushguli, in northern Georgia. How much all of this is authentic is debatable, but the director Mikhail Kalatozov has an impressive visual style consisting out of unusual camera angles (the point-of-view of a bucket being raised up on a tower by a rope pulled by villagers), frames, huge close-ups and contrasts between the small people filmed in wide shots of majestic mountains in the background, thus making this "ordinary" depiction of a backward village much more cinematic than expected. Some scenes are even comical: for instance, in order to underline what a huge "shortage" of salt there is in this mountainous area, the camera shows a goat licking the sweat from a head of a sleeping peasant, his legs, and even cows licking a spot after a man urinated behind a wall, because even urine has salt. It is interesting watching this hermetic culture, with some unusual situations (during one day in July, a shadow of a cloud covers the entire mountain, and snow suddenly falls, so the villagers have to quickly pick the grain before it freezes—how much of this is authentic, remains unknown) and poetic scenes (the mother dripping milk from her breast on the soil where he dead baby is buried), all showing the harsh nature and huge efforts of the locals to live and try to survive—with a propagandistic excuse in the end, namely that Soviet industrialization is needed to save these villagers from backwardness and isolation, and a road that will connect them with civilization and make their lives easier. Despite these convoluted prearranged set-ups, "Salt for Svanetia" is an impressive and expressionistic depiction of a peculiar place and culture.
Grade:+++
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