On the evening of her 52nd birthday, Georgian literature teacher Manana unexpectedly announces to her family that she is leaving. After thirty years of marriage and a turbulent family life in a three-room apartment, her husband Soso, her parents, two children and a son-in- law react to her decision first with disbelief and then shock.

However congenial family life in the tiny apartment appears to be, feelings of claustrophobia surface long before Manana is literally forced into a corner and pressured into explaining herself. While Manana’s decision to leave home comes up against the vehemently expressed opposition of her family, the audience is drawn from the very beginning onto her side of the conflict – not so much verbally as through the sensitive and sometimes side-taking camerawork and mise-en-scène. From the very first scene, the film appears to be committed to the spirit of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. And so the question about the motives for Manana’s behaviour is repeatedly reversed for the viewers: Why should Manana actually want something other than to sit alone at her open balcony window, eat cream cake and play melancholic Georgian tunes on her guitar?

Film series Internal Migration